Structural Power and Emotional Processes in Negotiation: A Social Exchange Approach

This chapter focuses in the abstract on when and how repeated negotiations between the same actors foster positive feelings or emotions and, in turn, an affective commitment to their relationship. However, we have in mind applications to pivotal dyads within organizations and also to the emergence of friction” or stickiness” in market relations. Implicit in the idea that negotiations in pivotal dyads shape institutional patterns is the notion that repeated negotiations between the same two actors are likely to become more than instrumental ways for the particular actors to get work done. We suggest a simple process by which dyadic negotiations give rise to incipient affective commitments that make the relationship an expressive object of attachment in its own right. When such transformations occur, future negotiations are not just efforts to solve yet another concrete issue or problem that the particular actors face; they come to symbolize or express the existence of a positive, productive relationship. Commitments that have an emotional/affective component tend to make the exchange relation an objective reality with intrinsic value to actors. In Berger and Luckmann\u27s (1967) terms, the relation becomes a third force.