Making the leap: Negotiating resource acquisition

Abstract

To suspend uncertainty, we can simply just choose to believe. A leap of faith - or the suspension of uncertainty - is the essence of trust, yet it remains a relatively unexplored phenomenon within the entrepreneurship literature. Trust reflects a willingness to bear risks, and as such, it is an underappreciated risk-bearing mechanism. Choosing to trust not only translates into the way entrepreneurs negotiate, but as we will see, also into the negotiated outcome. In the current study, we show that trust relates positively to negotiations, but we find that positional negotiations relate negatively to accomplishments, whereas collaborative negotiations relate positively. We study entrepreneurs who act as if those whom they are negotiating with are trustworthy, and we explore the effects of such leaps of faith on not only collaborative, but also positional negotiations, and their interaction effects. Using abductive reasoning, we unpack three related design principles.