Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 24, 2013

Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting

Social Innovations in the Classroom
Reconceptualizing the Teaching of Negotiations Skills to Business Students

The purpose of this paper is to describe an empirical study aimed at examining whether a student’s competitiveness orientation in a negotiation class could be shifted to a more socially responsible collaborative orientation. Several subtle manipulations were made between two different sections of the same undergraduate negotiation class. Data on competitiveness, empathy and perspective taking were collected at the beginning and again at the conclusion of the class. While sample size limited the impact of the findings, the data suggested that the manipulations may have had a positive effect.