Embracing Multi-Dimensionality: On the Necessity to Understand Sustainability Negotiations as Multi-Dimensional

Organizational and political decisions commonly require multiple stakeholders to resolve their conflicting interests in a process of negotiation. Most often, the agreements of negotiations cannot be adequately described by a single piece of information that describes the diverse consequences of negotiation agreements using a single metric. Instead, negotiation consequences are manifold and require a multi-dimensional perspective to capture the diversity of affected stakeholders, outcome qualities and characteristics. In addition to affecting the parties directly involved in jointly deciding upon a course of action, negotiation agreements also affect external parties who were not directly involved in the negotiation process. Moreover, negotiation agreements have distinct economic, social, and ecological consequences that—from a strong sustainability perspective—must be treated as non-fungible outcomes. Finally, negotiation agreements have multi-dimensional outcome characteristics that require negotiators to process and handle multiple information components to comprehensively describe the agreement consequences (e.g., outcome value vs. risk or immediate vs. future consequences). Hence, in order to foster our urgently needed societal sustainability transformations organizational and political negotiations must be understood as multi-dimensional. Disregarding negotiations’ consequences (1) for externalities (e.g., stakeholders who do not contribute to climate change but are affected by the actions of other stakeholders), (2) across diverse outcome qualities (e.g., rising social conflicts due to ecological system collapses), and (3) materializing through multi-dimensional characteristics (e.g., inefficient balancing of outcome values and risks) leads to non-sustainable agreements. Embracing negotiations’ multi-dimensionality aids us to draw externally valid conclusions about negotiators’ perceptions and behaviors and allows us to steer practitioners towards sustainability agreements that implement much needed societal sustainability transformations. While negotiation scholars have implicitly always understood negotiations as multi-dimensional, an explicit multi-dimensional negotiation framework has not been developed. To address this shortcoming, this dissertation’s aims are twofold: (1) on the one hand, this dissertation aims at laying a fundamental theoretical basis to understand negotiations as multi-dimensional. (2) On the other hand, this dissertation aims at investigating how negotiators manage different kinds of multi-dimensionality, how it affects their agreements, and how to potentially aid negotiators in processing negotiations’ multi-dimensionality. In particular, a series of two theoretical and two empirical research articles explores the multi-dimensionality of negotiations. We begin by theorizing on a particular characteristic of negotiation consequences that produces multi-dimensional outcomes but has not received adequate attention in the negotiation literature. Specifically, we develop a framework that argues that uncertainty about negotiation issues, strategies, and contexts provides negotiators with both potential outcome values and uncertainty levels (Article 1). Subsequently, we empirically investigate how negotiators’ necessity to process outcome values and risks affects their joint value creation (Article 2). As a third step, we take a broader perspective to theorize on how negotiations must be understood as sustainability negotiations, producing consequences for multiple (external) stakeholders that materialize across multiple outcome qualities (i.e., economic, social, and ecological). We present a negotiation-process model that aims to show how negotiators may reach sustainability agreements (Article 3). Finally, we again turn to an empirical investigation, examining how negotiators manage the increasing complexity of multi-dimensional negotiations that produce consequences (1) for externalities, (2) across economic and ecological outcome qualities, and (3) through the multi-dimensional outcome characteristic of uncertainty (Article 4). Overall, our theoretical work broadens the scope of relevant conflict resolution processes in negotiations in order for scholars and practitioners to embrace the multi-dimensionality of most negotiations. Across our empirical work, we find that negotiators handle multi-dimensionality in a biased manner. In negotiations with multi-dimensional uncertainty characteristics, negotiators systematically focus on the risk component, detrimentally affecting their joint exploration of high-quality agreements. In negotiations with ecological externalities, negotiators highly prioritize their own economic outcomes, detrimentally affecting their joint exploration of sustainability agreements. Even when provided with explicit ecological tipping points, negotiators primarily resolve their economic inter-party conflict, reaching inefficient agreements that leave externalities’ ecological outcomes at the brink of crisis. To conclude, I discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this dissertation and provide an outlook for promising areas of future research.