Journal of personality and social psychology
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The authors argue that implicit negotiation beliefs, which speak to the expected malleability of negotiating ability, affect performance in dyadic negotiations. They expected negotiators who believe negotiating attributes are malleable (incremental theorists) to outperform negotiators who believe negotiating attributes are fixed (entity theorists). In Study 1, they gathered evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the implicit negotiation belief construct. ⋯ Across all performance measures, incremental theorists outperformed entity theorists. Consistent with the authors' hypotheses, incremental theorists captured more of the bargaining surplus and were more integrative than their entity theorist counterparts, suggesting implicit theories are important determinants of how negotiators perform. Implications and future directions are discussed.