Creative People Create Values: Creativity and Positive Arousal in Negotiations

Abstract

Most negotiations are ill-structured situations, and the ability to identify novel options is likely to be crucial for success. This study, therefore, examined how creativity impacts negotiation processes and outcomes, and how this effect is moderated by positive arousal. The negotiators’ creative personality and their state of positive arousal were measured before they participated in a simulated negotiation, with the results demonstrating that the level of creativity in negotiation dyads was positively related to the negotiators’ joint outcome. Negotiators in high creativity dyads searched for more information by asking questions about priorities and were less narrowly focused by providing fewer single-issue offers than negotiators in low creativity dyads. Positive arousal did not affect outcome directly, but moderated the effect of creativity on joint outcomes; the effect of creativity was strongest under high levels of positive arousal. The discussion section emphasizes that future research may find creativity to have even more of a positive effect when negotiations become more complex.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jørn K. Rognes for his help in attaining parts of the data, to Nina Haraldsen and Aleksander Sivertsen for coding assistance, and to Alexander M. Sandvik and Therese E. Sverdrup for their helpful comments.

Notes

Note. N = 116 dyads. Alpha-values are shown in the diagonal.

^# p = .06. *p ≤ .05. **p ≤ .01. ***p ≤ .01.

Note. N = 116 dyads.

*p ≤ .05. **p ≤ .01. ***p ≤ .01.

Note. N = 21 dyads (11 low creativity dyads and 10 high creativity dyads). Process scores are square root transformed relative frequencies. For more information about the coding, see Appendix B.

*p ≤ .05. **p ≤ .01.

Note. Negotiators were only shown their own payoff matrix (either the buyer's or the seller's) and were not allowed to exchange payoff matrixes.

Note. Cohen's kappas were calculated separately for each code, i.e., assessing whether the coders agreed on a speaking turn to constitute the specific code or not. The average of the 14 kappas was .72. All kappas were above .66, except for multi-issue suggestion (.53), negative climate—remarks (.43), and arguments—attacking (.54).