Affect from Top Down: How Powerful Individuals' Positive Affect Shapes Negotiations

We tested the hypothesis that the positive affect of powerful negotiators shapes the quality of negotiation processes and outcomes more than the positive affect of less powerful negotiators. Findings from two studies supported the hypothesis: powerful individuals' trait positive affect was the best predictor of negotiators trust for each other and of whether they reached integrative outcomes. Positive affect predicted joint gains above and beyond negotiators trait cooperativeness and communicativeness. However, positive affect was unrelated to distributive outcomes; thus, there were no observed disadvantages of being positively affective.