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1. Introduction
Negotiations are an essential part of many business relations (Stoshikj, 2014). Fisher and Ury’s (1985) seminal work “Getting to Yes” and subsequent “Getting Past No” (Ury, 1991) popularized the work of the Harvard negotiation project, which developed an innovative approach to negotiations. These so-called principled negotiations outline strategies and techniques intend to shift the approach to negotiate from adopting fixed positions to a more flexible method based on the interests of each party. Each party makes decisions and has a stake in the outcome of the negotiations. Rather than haggling over a larger share of a fixed outcome, principled negotiations aim to create a mutually beneficial outcome for parties, in turn improving, or at least not harming, the (often commercial) relationships between the parties, and by doing so creates a better business outcome than other negotiation approaches and strategies (Fisher, 1985; Fisher and Ury, 1985; Ury, 1991).
Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that companies have been slow to utilize principled negotiation strategies in their negotiations (White, 1984). In this paper, we argue that the reluctance of companies and decision makers to use this style of negotiation, especially the decision in reaction to the first offer, shows similarities with the slow adaptation of evidence-based management in organizations. From this, we argue that both principled negotiations and evidence-based management can be seen as innovative strategies to improve management in general and decision making more specific within organizations.
Cognitive biases or heuristics, as well as cultural value dimensions, affect decision making (Kahneman et al., 2011), which, in turn, limit the adaptation of these kind of innovative approaches within organizations (Caputo, 2013). Cognitive biases describe the irrational and suboptimal decisions which humans make (Kahneman et al., 2011) and which have influence on the adaptation of principled negotiations and evidence-based management within organizations.
In addition, by piggybacking the research related to the adoption of evidence-based management and principled negotiations approaches, we aim to draw novel parallels between fostering innovative behavior and creating innovative insights within organizations into this field of negotiations. Innovative behavior, defined as the ability to generate and implement creative ideas (West and Farr, 1990), is recognized as a major contributor to organizational innovation, leveraging the propensity of firms to survive in dynamic and challenging...