Some people are practically phobic about going to the bargaining table. If their minimum needs are met, they'll sign on the dotted line just to end the stress of dealing with people who have different agendas and styles. But that can be an expensive aversion, the authors write. When you're facing an important negotiation, rigorous preparation--running the numbers, scouting the marketplace, developing a Plan B--is essential. But it's only half the story. The truth is that your passions matter in real-life deal making and dispute resolution. You need to understand, channel, and learn from your emotions in order to adapt to the situation at hand and engage others successfully. The authors studied 20 seasoned negotiators to explore their thoughts and feelings about the process. They invited their participants to find and combine pictures that metaphorically depicted those feelings, and to describe in in-depth interviews the collages they'd created. Three reasons for the stressfulness of the negotiation experience emerged: lack of control, unpredictability, and the absence of feedback. This article includes a six-step warm-up exercise to help you prepare emotionally to negotiate effectively.
This brief note introduces to the student the challenges and rewards of learning to be a more skilled negotiator. Negotiation requires the integration of keen analytic insight with emotional intelligence capabilities.
This extensive note synthesizes current psychological and neuroscientific research on how people make decisions with moral implications. Research summaries and scenarios illustrate critical issues.
Six different business disputes, all in the shadow of pending litigation, are described. Students are asked to recommend the appropriate method of dispute resolution (mediation, arbitration, mini-trial, etc.) for each one, depending on the circumstances, especially to assess likely barriers to unassisted negotiation.
In negotiation, correctly identifying your counterpart's strategy is vital. Only then can you constructively influence their behavior--or adapt appropriately to what they are doing. This case--and its related computer-based exercise (Negotiation Strategy Simulation)--illuminate how through a thoughtful process of probing and testing, a negotiator may determine whether the other party tends to be cooperative or competitive. The material also demonstrates how the benefit of such learning must be weighed against the possible costs of being provocative.
Distills the negotiation advice of more than a dozen general books on negotiation. Compares and contrasts specific prescriptions and organizes the books into five loose categories: win-win or mutual gains negotiation, negotiation analysis, relational negotiation, negotiation in context, and the school of hard knocks. An appendix provides a more extensive bibliography.
Sets the stage for analyzing the strategy of labor organizer Ray Rogers in bringing J.P. Stevens to the bargaining table when conventional union tactics failed. Though set in the specific context of labor-management relations, it illustrates much more fundamental aspects of negotiation analysis, strategy, and tactics. A rewritten version of an earlier case.
Legal policy has a long history of protecting confidentiality of negotiations that are designed to produce settlement. However, within the past several decades there has been a significant push toward openness. Compelling arguments support confidentiality: It helps promote candid discussion when sensitive material is involved and may make settlements possible. On the other hand, ethical concern where public health and safety are involved has prompted some states to pass laws requiring the disclosure of settlement agreements or to revise their procedures governing confidentiality of discovery, protective orders, and sealing of litigation records. This case summarizes the legal and ethical debate. It identifies the major issues surrounding confidentiality in settlement negotiations and illustrates them with several examples.
This case distills the practical implications of current research on nonverbal communication. The first section sketches different kinds of nonverbal behavior: facial expressions, eye movements, physical gestures, paraverbal cues, posture, and "personal space." The next section looks more deeply at the interactive nature of nonverbal communication--specifically, how one person's behavior both influences and reflects what others do. The final section suggests how negotiators can make better use of nonverbal communication. Five themes run throughout the case: 1) we communicate far more information to other people than is conveyed by our words alone, 2) our nonverbal signals sometimes contradict the words we use, 3) much of this communication is less than fully conscious, 4) reading nonverbal communication is an art, not a science, and 5) nonverbal communication must be understood in the context of the broader set of interactions among all parties.
This case is reflection on the importance of acquiring presence of mind in negotiations. Using a variety of metaphors, the case explores different ways for negotiators to achieve this selfawareness. Athletes experience the phenomenon of "being in the zone," artists and writers speak of being "in flow," and practitioners of mediation strive for "mindfulness." These different experiences all provide insight for negotiators as they face complex interpersonal and contextual discussions. This case resents a vivid example of a firefighter facing an extreme situation--and using an enviable presence of mind to see it through.
This case summarizes how American courts measure damages in wrongful death suits. Various standards are compared, as are their implications for business management.
This case highlights an application of current thoughts in complexity science to negotiation theory. It emphasizes a provocative approach that questions much of traditional negotiation research thus far. The case explains the roots of complexity science and some broad ideas and definitions, such as linearity versus nonlinearity, feedback loops, and chaos. It turns to a subset of complexity science--the study of complex adaptive systems. These systems have interactive feedback loops and critical junctures that affect the future course of the system. Also, they are highly adaptive and creative. Negotiations are complex, adaptive systems and should be studied at the micro, interactional scale. Five key lessons are drawn: 1) seemingly simple negotiations can take surprisingly different paths; 2) situations that appear complex may be driven by only a few key factors; 3) large patterns are often reflected in small ones; 4) complex adaptive systems, like negotiation, are not utterly random, yet neither do they have a fixed equilibrium; and 5) creativity is spawned at the chaotic edge.
This exercise helps students evaluate their negotiating style on traditional measures of creating versus claiming, and empathy and assertiveness. In just a few minutes, they can see where their natural style lies on a matrix.
In 1997, MIT freshman Scott Kruger died from alcohol poisoning after a ritual fraternity ceremony. His death sparked national controversy over the responsibility of universities for their students. For his parents, though, the pain was personal and almost solely directed at the leadership of MIT. In such an emotionally charged situation, it is remarkable that the lawyers on both sides came to a settlement.
Military metaphors are commonplace in business writing about strategy, but they are rarely used in the negotiation literature. This case takes the Marine Corps philosophy of warfighting and compares it with the tactics and techniques of effective negotiators. Some of the characteristics of war--such as friction, imperfect information and communication, fluidity, and disorder--are also parts of negotiations. Likewise, some of the techniques military strategists use, like exploiting gaps in the enemy's lines and using boldness and speed to surprise the enemy, can also work for negotiators. Most critically, however, this case applies the notion of complexity to both warfare and negotiation and introduces students to the ideas of continual adaptation and dynamic responses to changing environments.