A Prescriptive Organizational Model for Transitional Negotiations

Customary organizational negotiations tend to focus efforts to attaining optimality in single-problem contexts that are both disparate and temporary in nature. Once the negotiations are settled, the process usually attains closure and the long-term impact of the outcome is rarely considered. In reality, however, decisions involving quid pro quos are made on a continuous basis. Since organizational environments are constantly in flux, negotiated solutions that appeared successful on a given problem at first no longer work out to be effective in the long run. We postulate that organizations evolve from one state to another and with it new negotiations are initiated on a continual basis, one negotiation transitioning into another. From this perspective, organizations can be modeled using sequential Markov chains that converge on homeostasis, leading to a prescriptive approach for transitional negotiations that suggest acceptance of short term losses in favor of the better payoffs that are to come.