Changing Perspective – Toward a Configurational Perspective on Deception in Business Negotiations

Negotiations in business are a core managerial activity across functional areas. Negotiations are particularly relevant for forming and managing buyer-supplier collaborations. Within these negotiations, deceptive behavior has been found to be widespread, and some forms of deception (i.e., bluffing) have even been seen as norm-complying in the eyes of both the actor and the target. Previous studies on deceptive negotiation behavior in the supply chain management field have relied on experimental research but have had limited ecological validity. Studies in other fields have focused almost exclusively on the actor's (deceiver’s) perspective—for example, investigating actor motivation or traits using correlational analyses. Using two qualitative studies, we provide in-depth empirical insights into deceptive supplier behavior in negotiations from the buyer/target perspective. We begin by conducting 35 exploratory interviews with buyers and sales managers (Study 1) to scrutinize previous conceptualizations of lies and bluffs as forms of deceptive B2B negotiation behavior. In Study 1, we show that deceptive behavior is causally complex and influenced by a combination of different firm-level and individual-level factors. This key finding informed our second study, in which we conducted 68 interviews with another set of buyers; these buyers were asked in the interview to describe one specific negotiation with one supplier. Then, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we systematically analyzed these negotiations for evidence of buyers’ experience of deceptive supplier behavior. Our configurational analysis yielded eight total constellations of factors—both firm-level and individual-level factors— that affected buyers’ experience of deceptive supplier behavior; in six constellations buyers experienced high degrees of deceptive supplier behavior, and in two constellations they experienced low degrees of deceptive supplier behavior. We shift and advance the current research direction on deceptive negotiation behavior by using a configurational theorizing approach and adopting a target perspective on deception.