Kathleen M. O'Connor

Negotiators' bargaining histories and their effects on future negotiation performance.

In 2 studies the authors show that the quality of deals negotiators reach are significantly influenced by their previous bargaining experiences. As predicted, negotiators who reached an impasse on a prior negotiation were more likely either to impasse in their next negotiation or to reach deals of low joint value compared to those who had reached an initial agreement. Notably, the impact of past performance on subsequent deals was just as strong for negotiators who changed partners on the 2nd occasion. Results highlight the role of bargaining histories as significant predictors of negotiation behavior. Moreover, they suggest that, at least in some cases, negotiations should be conceptualized as interrelated exchanges rather than separable incidents.

Recognizing Social Capital in Social Networks: Experimental Results

Social capital is an asset that has been positively linked to peoples positions in social networks (Burt, 1992). Yet, what allows some people to shift into these positions has received far less attention. We sought to fill this hole in the literature by offering socio-cognitive explanations for why and how some come to occupy critical positions while others do not. We proposed and found that self-construal - or how people view themselves in relation to their social world - affects peoples ability to learn and understand a novel social network. The greater peoples cognitive ability, the faster they learned the network. However, self-construal attenuated the effect; cognitive ability mattered for those who had a more independent (i.e., less relational) self-construal, but had no effect on learning for those who were more relational in their self-construal. Given more time, those higher in relational self-construal (RSC) developed more accurate perceptions of the status and power relations in the network. The same was not true of those who were low in RSC. We discuss the implications for peoples ability to spot opportunities for enhancing their social capital.