Interactive Approach to Negotiating Styles Dependent on Personality Traits

Purpose: This study was of a theoretical character and aimed at presenting various descriptions of the interactions between all possible pairs of four well-known negotiating styles dependent on personality traits. Methodology: This study was based on analysis of the interactions as well as authors’ experiences from their observations and analyses on human behaviors during numerous negotiations and roleplay exercises arranged at the courses for practitioners. The stress was put on analyzing the interactions occurring between people representing both different and the same negotiating styles. Findings: The attempt at describing such interactions was successful and promising for farther research. The concept constitutes a useful tool for analyzing human behavioral aspects of different types of business negotiations, within the process of their planning, conduct and evaluation. Nevertheless, the concept will be a subject of subsequent authors’ research, focusing on its improvement mainly by searching more precise features of negotiating styles and interactions between them. Practical implications: The concept can be applied to analyze many real negotiation situations as well as within the experiment to be arranged by the authors to examine those interactions within the hundreds of pairs of negotiators solving particular case studies. Thus the description of such interactions can be treated as a specific hypothesis. Originality: In general, the suggestion for solving complex, difficult and essential issues of negotiating styles was presented but was rarely investigated in the literature on negotiations. In particular, an original concept of describing the interactions between those styles was suggested.