Intervening Effects of the Personality Dimension Agreeableness on Negotiation Strategy Selection in Budget Negotiations

This paper presents results of an experiment testing how the personality dimension agreeableness interacts with different organizational factors to affect the strategy chosen when entering a budget negotiation. Prior budget research suggests firms invite subordinates into budget negotiations primarily to elicit private information from subordinate managers. However, criticism of traditional budgeting processes suggests subordinates will act strategically in such negotiations, limiting the effectiveness of inviting managers into budget negotiations. This study hypothesizes the factors most criticized, including budget targets in performance evaluation, will interact with certain organizational factors, connectedness of organizational units, and an individual personality dimension to significantly affect the amount of information managers share through the choice of negotiation strategy. Results indicate such interaction may impact how and to what extent information is shared in the budget negotiation, suggesting important implications for how budget managers approach budget negotiations