The Effect of Level of Negotiation Support Systems and Cultural Diversity on Coalition Formation

This article is an attempt to investigate the role of negotiation support systems (NSSs) in supporting inter-team negotiations, which have become commonplace for today’s business negotiations. Inter-team negotiations differ from simple dyadic negotiations, and are associated with enormous complexity introduced by the negotiating team dynamics. When there are three or more members in a negotiating team, coalition formation by team members stands out as an intriguing phenomenon, of which cultural diversity is a primary antecedent. NSSs through altering coalition formation dynamics have important impacts on various negotiation outcomes. An experiment was conducted to test our research model and hypotheses. A content analysis was undertaken to measure the extent of coalition formation. Besides the quantitative approach, a qualitative analysis was also conducted to further enhance our exploratory efforts in examining the phenomenon. The results provide initial evidence of the usefulness of NSSs in supporting inter-team negotiations and have both theoretical and practical implications.