Your Good Name: The Relationship Between Perceived Reputational Risk and Acceptability of Negotiation Tactics

Reputation serves important functions in social interactions. As a result, negotiators should be concerned about protecting their reputations. Using an online experiment with 343 respondents, we examined the impact of perceived reputational risk on the acceptability of potentially questionable tactics. Consistent with and extending previous findings, we found that, the more reputational risk negotiators perceive, the less acceptable they find the tactics to be. In addition, in the business negotiation context, females generally viewed questionable tactics as more reputationally risky and consequently less acceptable than did males, especially when they were primed to think of themselves as being powerful. We end our paper with discussions on contributions and implications of the findings.