Power, Propensity to Negotiate, and Moving First in Competitive Interactions

• Published in: Personality & social psychology bulletin Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 200 - 212
• Main Authors: Magee, Joe C., Galinsky, Adam D., Gruenfeld, Deborah H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Thousand Oaks, CA SAGE Publications 01-02-2007; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Adult; Bargaining; Competition; Competitive Behavior; Experiments; Female; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Male; Motivation; Negotiating; Negotiation; Power; Power (Psychology); Propensity; Social Behavior; Social Identification; Social interaction; Social power; priming; competition; power; proactive behavior; anchoring; negotiation
• ISSN: 0146-1672; 1552-7433
• DOI: 10.1177/0146167206294413

Five experiments investigated how the possession and experience of power affects the initiation of competitive interaction. In Experiments 1a and 1b, high-power individuals displayed a greater propensity to initiate a negotiation than did low-power individuals. Three additional experiments showed that power increased the likelihood of making the first move in a variety of competitive interactions. In Experiment 2, participants who were semantically primed with power were nearly 4 times as likely as participants in a control condition to choose to make the opening arguments in a debate competition scenario. In Experiment 3, negotiators with strong alternatives to a negotiation were more than 3 times as likely to spontaneously express an intention to make the first offer compared to participants who lacked any alternatives. Experiment 4 showed that high-power negotiators were more likely than low-power negotiators to actually make the first offer and that making the first offer produced a bargaining advantage.