| Affect, emotional intelligence (EI), and team interactions are highly interrelated themes; all pertain to the patterning and adaptation of social behavior under emotionally eliciting conditions. Yet, research streams on these three topics rarely come together. Rather, most studies examine either the predictive utility of EI, the nature of emotions in organizational life, or the role of affective processes within teams. As a complement to the current literature, the study examines the relationship between EI and both subjective and objective negotiation outcomes. Drawing upon theories of social interdependence and trait activation theory, a model specifying how emotional self-regulation and perception at the individual-level interacts with the negotiation situation to influence outcomes via affective processes is developed and tested. A total of 120 participants were randomly assigned to either a cooperative and conflicted same-sex negotiation session. To promote targeted effects, three "active ingredients" salient to competition were manipulated simultaneously: (1) payoff structure (i.e., integrative vs. distributive), (2) reward structure (e.g., interdependent vs. independent), and (3) social motive (i.e., cooperative vs. competitive). As hypothesized, moderated mediated effects were found for emotional regulation in predicting self-satisfaction via state negative affect in competitive contexts only. The effects of emotional facial perception via state positive affect, however, were opposite the hypothesized direction for predicting both process and relationship satisfaction in cooperative contexts only. In contrast to subjective outcomes, the two EI by negotiation interactions did not predict economic gains. The emotional perception interaction held after accounting for agreeableness whereas the emotional regulation interaction fell to non-significance after accounting for neuroticism and cognitive ability. Implications and future directions for creating a situated understanding of EI and emotions in negotiations are discussed. |
