"Should I Negotiate?" A Model of Negotiation Initiation Considering Psychological Person-Environment Transactions

We qualitatively investigated why employees initiated negotiations with their supervisors to elaborate a theoretical model of negotiation initiation in organizational contexts. Consistent with the model, employees initiated negotiations when they felt negative discrepancy and negative affect and when they believed the negotiation issue had a high valence, the benefits outweighed costs, and their probability of being able to successfully initiate and complete the negotiation was high. Employees did not initiate negotiations if they did not perceive negative discrepancies or negative affect, or if the activating effects of negative discrepancy and negative affect were buffered by negative instrumentality, no expectancy, or low valence. The qualitative results led the model to be systematically extended to a transactional model which includes social, contextual, and intraindividual influences on employees' decisions about whether to negotiate (or not), showing how the negotiation partner, negotiation situation, and negotiators' states and dispositions influence cognitive-motivational antecedents of negotiation initiation.