U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business, United States
Negative emotions often impair a team’s ability to negotiate win-win solutions. For example, the intense expression of emotions during a budget discussion in a management team can lead team members to withdraw and withhold information needed to discover integrative potential. To reduce the intensity of negative emotions in the team, leaders may get the advice to not directly engage with their teams’ emotions, such as by taking a break if things get heated. However, psychological research suggests that not directly acknowledging others’ emotions may heighten the expressed intensity of negative emotions. We bring this work into the negotiation setting to explore whether such acknowledgment may prove more fruitful than past advice to disengage and give space. Specifically, we explore whether leaders can mitigate the escalation of negative emotional expressions by acknowledging, rather than not acknowledging, their team’s emotions, thus facilitating joint value creation. We find support for our hypotheses in an experiment of 190 face-to-face teams and a pre-registered online experiment. We find that by acknowledging emotions, leaders can reduce the extent to which negative emotional expressions hinder their team’s capacity to reach optimal agreements.
