A Study On The Relationships Among Harmony Motives And Negotiation Subjective Value In Construction Claim Negotiation

Construction project dispute occurs frequently, and claim is inevitable. Claim negotiations are always chosen preferentially by both sides for its contribution to the maintenance of the claim and its cheap, unstructured, fast characteristics. Negotiators not only pursue the maximization of the economic benefits, but also try to maintain a harmonious relationship between the two sides. Harmony is an important principle of interpersonal interaction. The motives of the people who pursue harmonious interpersonal interaction is dual. One is harmony enhancement, and the other is harmony as hindrance. Both the two kinds of motives have a significant impact on the behaviors of the negotiators and outcome of the negotiations. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between harmony motives and negotiation subjective value of the engineering claim situation in China, and whether bargaining power is the moderator between harmony motives and negotiation subjective value or not.Based on 140 questionnaires survey data,we use the factor analysis and structural equation model to verify the scales of harmony motives, negotiation subjective value and bargaining power for the applicability of the engineering claim situation in China. The relationship between harmony motives and negotiation subjective value is studied through questionnaire, correlation analysis and multivariate linear regression analysis. We get the conclusions that harmony enhancement has positive effect on negotiation subjective value. Which means to obtain better feelings about the instrumental outcome, self, process and relationship; While harmony as hindrance will result in worse results feelings about the instrumental outcome, self, process, and its effect on feeling about relationship is not significant.In addition, the existing research has showed that power is a moderator between social motive and negotiation results. Harmony motives is a kind of generalized social motives which is closely related to Chinese culture, so this research attempts to explore the effect of bargaining power on the relationship between harmony motives and negotiation subjective value. The results show that bargaining power is a negative moderator between harmony as hindrance and feelings about the instrumental outcome. However, the other research hypotheses are not supported.