Is There a Better Style to Negotiate? An Analysis of Negotiation Styles and their Impacts on Buyer Seller Negotiations

Given the importance of negotiation outcomes on profits, companies are increasingly investing in negotiation training to optimally prepare their sales and procurement teams and to improve their negotiation performance. In this context, the analysis of different negotiation styles (e.g., dominating, integrating, etc.) has received much attention in the literature. Interestingly, however, to date, there are few insights on which negotiation style is the best to choose, especially concerning the counterpart’s style. This paper analyzes this question by applying an extensive coding system to a realistic buyer-seller negotiation experiment. Among others, our results indicate that applying the dominating negotiation style yields the worst negotiation outcomes – irrespective of the counterparty’s style.