Political skill in job negotiations: a two-study constructive replication
International Journal of Conflict Management
ISSN: 1044-4068
Article publication date: 9 February 2015
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the effects of political skill in a specific workplace setting – the job negotiation. The authors expected negotiator political skill to be positively related to distributive negotiation outcome, problem-solving as a negotiation strategy to mediate this relationship and political skill to also moderate – that is amplify – the link between problem-solving and negotiation outcome.
Design/methodology/approach
In Study 1, a laboratory-based negotiation simulation was conducted with 88 participants; the authors obtained self-reports of political skill prior to the negotiation and – to account for non-independence of negotiating partners’ outcome – used the Actor–Partner Interdependence Model for data analysis. Study 2 was carried out as a real-life negotiation study with 100 managers of a multinational corporation who were given the opportunity to re-negotiate their salary package prior to a longer-term foreign assignment. Here, the authors drew on two objective measures of negotiation success, increase of annual gross salary and additional annual net benefits.
Findings
In Study 1, the initial hypothesis – political skill will be positively related to negotiator success – was fully supported. In Study 2, all three hypotheses (see above) were fully supported for additional annual net benefits and partly supported for increase of annual gross salary.
Originality/value
To the authors' best knowledge, this paper presents the first study to examine political skill as a focal predictor variable in the negotiation context. Furthermore, the studies also broaden the emotion-centered approach to social effectiveness that is prevalent in current negotiation research.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Stefan Diestel for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research was partly supported by a grant from the Rectorate of the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany.
Citation
Solga, M., Betz, J., Düsenberg, M. and Ostermann, H. (2015), "Political skill in job negotiations: a two-study constructive replication", International Journal of Conflict Management, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 2-24. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCMA-02-2012-0022
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited