The Effects Of Social Motivation, Task Structure And Communication Media On Multilateral Negotiation

The paper intended to investigate how the social motivation, task structure would affect the process and outcomes of multilateral negotiation under different communication media, including face-to-face(FTF) and computer mediated communication(CMC). Social motivation, task structure, communication media were designed as independent variables and negotiation profits, negotiation quality, negotiation time, negotiation strategy included integrative and distribute strategy, negotiation satisfaction were designed as dependent variables in these 2×2×2 experiments. In our 2 laboratory experiments, we used the tower market negation game as experimental task, with 144 subjects from 3 universities in HangZhou city. The findings were found as following:1. Social motivation, task structure and communication media had three-way interaction effects for distributive and integrative negotiation strategy, and task structure, social motivation had two-way interaction effects for negotiation satisfaction of the decision rules.2. Comparing with egoistic motivation, negotiators under prosocial motivation showed more satisfaction towards the outcomes and process. Meanwhile, negotiators under computer mediated communication showed less satisfaction towards the rule of negation compared with those negotiators under face-to face communication. At the same time, we found that in the asymmetrical task structure negotiator with prosocial motivation showed more satisfaction towards the rules compared with those with egoistic motivation.3. Prosocial motivated negotiators were more likely to use the integrativestrategy compared with the egoistic motivated negotiators under the same condition. And as computer mediated communication negotiation condition, negotiator under asymmetrical task structure showed more likely to use the distributive strategy which had the function of value claim and the process management strategy.4. Social motivation and communication media showed no effect on the quality and group or individual profits of the negotiation. Comparing with the negotiators under asymmetrical task structure, the negotiators under symmetrical task structure were more likely to reach the integrative negotiation outcome, but it's effect was not significant on the profits of both group level and individual level.5. Negotiators under computer mediated communication needed much more time for reach the agreements of the negotiation.