While few of us are involved in high-profile negotiations like international trade agreements, most people engage in frequent negotiations across all aspects of their work and career. Whether it be requesting a higher salary, expressing remote work preferences or discussing tasks with other team members, we negotiate every day, often without realizing it.
Professor A.J Corner wants to reframe how we view negotiations by establishing a new way of measuring their dynamics.
He aims to move beyond traditional, competition-focused models and introduce a more holistic,
relationship-based approach that emphasizes the quality of social exchange between parties.
Through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant he has received for his project titled “Social Exchange in Negotiation Settings: Developing a Measure and Multi-Phase Model,” Corner wishes to deepen our understanding of how we build and maintain productive relationships with negotiation partners during different phases of their development.
Specifically, Corner is validating a new scale that measures quality of social exchange in negotiation settings. The scale emphasizes the reciprocal nature of negotiation by capturing how individual negotiators perceive the balance of contributions between themselves and their collaborative partners at critical phases in the negotiation process.
A relationship-based approach
Rather than emphasizing only the bargaining phase in negotiations, Corner’s model and scale will encourage a give and take approach, focusing on building and maintaining a productive relationship over time. This could help collective bargaining groups, institutions and individual employees.
