Title: Impact of personality types on negotiations - A study conducted with the help of the personality test The Big Five.

Level: Final assignment for Bachelor Degrees in Business Administration

Author: Felicia Sökare and Josefin Ruthman Lloyd

Supervisor: Jonas Kågström

Date: 2019 May

Aim: The purpose of this study is to analyze the personality traits of negotiators in relation to how they prepare for a negotiation and in relation to what is required to refrain from negotiating with the help of The Big Five.

Method:The study is based on mixed methods. The method is based on a combination of both a qualitative and quantitative research method. The empirical material is obtained through five semi-structured interviews with a total of 15 real estate agents who, in connection with the interviews, answered a questionnaire survey. The data was processed using a cluster analysis, which was created in the statistical computer program SPSS. The results are then compared with theory and the interviews.

Result & Conclusions: The results of the study show that real estate agents read in on the statistics, listen to music and come in good time to prepare for a negotiation. The result also shows that threatening, lack of communication, high price expectations or a bad feeling inside requires that negotiators in the real estate brokerage refrain from entering into negotiations. Through this study we can observe that high values of extraversion and low values of neuroticism do not have to be related to a competing negotiating style, which differs from what previous research has shown.

Contribution of the thesis:The study's implementation has provided both practical and theoretical contributions, especially how different negotiators with different personality profiles prepare for negotiation and in which situations they choose to refrain from entering into negotiations. The study gives an insight that negotiators are not quite as personal in character, meaningful information about what differences there are in preparing for negotiators with more and less experience in the professional role of real estate agent, an insight that the words that the real estate agents use most during the interviews show connection with their personality traits and knowledge of which personalities choose to refrain from being included in the negotiation at the first customer meeting.

Suggestions for future research:As this study focuses on real estate agents and their personalities, it would be interesting to investigate other industries to see if real estate agents results differ from other professional roles. It would also be interesting to carry out the study in other countries to investigate whether there are any similarities or differences in comparison with the real estate agents in Sweden. Further research should continue to investigate real estate agents with more and less experience in the industry to ensure the results in this study.

Key words: Personality, The Big Five, real estate agents, integrative negotiations, negotiation, preparation.