ABSTRACT
The 21st century workplace is a “new world” relative to the workplace that preceded it, and this new world (for reasons explained in this book) necessitates negotiating effectively in ways that have generally been under-studied in prior negotiation or management studies. The “litigation explosion” (Groth, Goldman, Gilliland, & Bies, 2002; Olson, 1992) is among the ways distinguishing the 21st century workplace from work experiences in earlier days. The increasing cost and risk of lawsuits makes negotiation—rather than litigation—an attractive alternative. Additional attributes that distinguish the 21st century workplace from work experiences in earlier days include organizations’: increasing willingness to restructure in ways that result in employee layoffs (unheard of in earlier times; cf. Levine, 2002); globalization of products and services (Friedman, 2005); greater employee diversity (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007); and greater reliance on technology-mediated communications among employees, including team members and suppliers (Bailey & Kurland, 2002; Valley, White, & Iacobucci, 1992) increasingly dispersed around the globe. Cumulatively, these changes in the nature of work necessitate negotiation skills for not only preventing or resolving disputes in ways less costly than litigation, but also conducting everyday as well as more complex business transactions. Not surprisingly, then, negotiation skills are increasingly viewed by organizations as strategically important for individual employees as well as managers and thus as a source of organizations’ sustainable competitive advantage (Barney, 1991; Thompson, 2009).
