Negotiation skills

Negotiation is a decision-making process among interdependent parties who do not share identical preferences. The negotiation parties decide what each will give and take in their relationship.
Some organizational behavior scholars note that there are similarities between negotiation strategies and conflict management. For example, a manager can successfully negotiate a salary raise or a good price for supplies.
Traditional negotiation Approaches
When negotiating, generally people and managers in particular tend to have certain biases and make certain errors, which prevent them from negotiating rationally and getting the most from situation. To compound the problem, there is recent research indicating that negotiators tend to repeat their mistakes. Negotiations tend to overly affected by the frame, or form of presentation, of information in a negotiation.

Besides these common bias problems, negotiators traditionally may take either a distributive or a positional bargaining approach. Distributive bargaining assumes a “fixed pie” and focuses on how to get the biggest share, or “slice of the pie,” teams in today’s organizations, focusing on research of the effectiveness of teams in distributive bargaining. The conflict management strategies of compromising, forcing, accommodating, and avoiding, mentioned earlier, all tend to be associated with a distributive negotiation strategy.
In simplest form, this is what happens when one haggles in an open market. However, positional bargaining also happens in international diplomacy.It provides an anchor in an uncertain and pressured situation; and it can eventually produce the terms of an acceptable agreement.”
Contemporary Negotiation skills
There are now recognized alternative approaches to traditionally recognized distributed and positional bargaining and the hard versus soft strategies in negotiation. Whetten and Cameron suggest an integrative approach that takes an “expanding the pie” perspective that uses problem-solving techniques to find win-win outcomes. Based on a collaborating (rather than a compromising, forcing, accommodating, or avoiding) strategy, the integrative approach requires the effective negotiator to use skills such as (1) establishing superordinate goals; (2) separating the people from the problems; (3) focusing on interests not on positions; (4) inventing options for mutual gain; and (5) using objective criteria.
Recent practical guidelines for effective negotiations are as follows:
1. Low-risk negotiation techniques
a) Flattery- subtle flattery usually works best, but the standards may differ by age, sex, and cultural factors.
b) Addressing the easy point first- this helps build trust and momentum for the tougher issues.
c) Silence-this can be effective in gaining concessions, but one must be careful not to provoke anger or frustration in opponents.
d) Inflated opening position -this may elicit a counteroffer that shows the opponent’s position or may shift the point of compromise.
e) “oh, poor me ”- this may lead to sympathy but could also bring out the killer instinct in opponents.
2. High- risk negotiation techniques
a. Unexpected temper losses- erupting in anger can break an impasse and get one’s point across, but it can also be viewed as immature or
manipulative and lead opponents to harden their position.
b. High- balling - this is used to gain trust by appearing to give in to the opponent’s position, but when overturned by a higher authority, concessions are gained based on the trust.
c. Boulwarism (“take it or leave it”) - named after a former vice president of GE who would make only one offer in labor negotiations, this is a highly aggressive strategy that may also produce anger and frustration in opponents.
d. Waiting until the last moment- after using stall tactics and knowing that a deadline is near, a reasonable but favorable offer is made, leaving the opponent with little choice but to accept.
Besides these low- and high-risk strategies, these are also a number of other negotiation techniques, such as a two- person team using “good cop-bad cop” (one is tough, followed by one who is kind), and various psychological ploys, such as insisting that meetings be held on one’s home turf, scheduling meetings at inconvenient times, or interrupting meetings with phone calls or side meetings. There are four basic elements in this alternative approach to negotiation. Very simply, they are:
#People- Separate the people from the problem
#Interests - Focus on interests, not positions
#Options- Generate a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do
#Criteria- Insist that the result be based on some objective standard
The principled skills go beyond hard versus soft and change the game to negotiation on the basis of merits. For example, in soft bargaining the participants are friends, in hard bargaining they are advantages, but in the principled approach they are problem solvers; in soft bargaining the approach is to trust others, in hard bargaining there is distrust of others, but in the principled approach the negotiator proceeds independent of trust; and in the soft approach negotiators make offers, in the hard approach they make threats, but in the principled approach they explore common interests. These principled negotiation skills can result in a wise agreement.
Along with social, emotional, behavioral, leadership, team, and communication skills, these negotiation skills are becoming increasingly recognized as important to management of not only conflict but also effective management in general.

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