Concluding Remarks Setting the Scene: The Calculus of Agreement in Group Negotiation

Purpose – To provide a framework for organizing research on group negotiation, including the contributions of the current volume.Methodology – The organizing framework arranges past research on group negotiation and the contributions offered in this volume according to the core negotiation elements of people, processes, and places, and their impact on the integration of negotiators' preferences.Findings – There is an extensive literature on negotiation, but historically group negotiation has represented only a small part of that dialogue. There are three general categories of group negotiation: multiparty negotiation, team negotiation, and multiteam negotiation. The core issue addressed in this chapter is how – viewed through the lens of the four identified core negotiation elements of preferences, people, processes, and places – the quantity and arrangement of negotiators involved in a negotiation qualitatively changes the negotiation experience, and specifically how (different types of) negotiating groups make more complex the challenge of identifying, agreeing to, and implementing integrative agreements.Implications – More than dyadic negotiation, the difficulty of reaching agreements that satisfy all parties can lead to agreements that some negotiators are less than enthusiastic about implementing. It is the difficulty and importance of finding agreements that satisfy all parties in group negotiation that makes it so important to understand the influence of group negotiation by people, processes, and places.Value of the Paper – This chapter organizes the landscape of group negotiation research by illuminating both what we know about the people, processes, and places that influence the negotiation of group members' preferences, as well as pointing the way – both theoretically and methodologically – for future researchers to fill in the blanks that remain.