Conflict and Negotiations Discussion 250 words blackboard discussionBased on examples from one of the recommended articles selected by you, and other sourc

Conflict and Negotiations Discussion 250 words blackboard discussionBased on examples from one of the recommended articles selected by you, and other sources, discuss one or several of the themes: group decision making, conflict and negotiations, making rational decisions in negotiations, strategic decision making in organizations, strategic decision success in organizations, evaluation of strategic decisions – the VRIO framework, management cycles and business decisions in organizations. SPOTLIGHT ON THE SOFTER SIDE OF NEGOTIATION
SPOTLIGHT
ARTWORK Jack Sutherland, Vitrine
Acrylic on panel, courtesy of saatchiart.com
HBR.ORG
Alison Wood Brooks is
an assistant professor at
Harvard Business School.
She teaches negotiation
in the MBA and executive
education curricula and
is affiliated with the
Behavioral Insights Group.
Emotion and the
Art of Negotiation
How to use your feelings to your advantage by Alison Wood Brooks
I
T IS, WITHOUT QUESTION, my favorite day of the semester—the
day when I teach my MBA students a negotiation exercise called
“Honoring the Contract.”
I assign students to partners, and each reads a different account
of a (fictitious) troubled relationship between a supplier (a manufacturer of computer components) and a client (a search engine
start-up). They learn that the two parties signed a detailed contract eight months earlier, but now they’re at odds over several of
the terms (sales volume, pricing, product reliability, and energy
efficiency specs). Each student assumes the role of either client or
supplier and receives confidential information about company finances and politics. Then each pair is tasked with renegotiating—a process that could lead to an
amended deal, termination of the contract, or expensive litigation.
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SPOTLIGHT ON THE SOFTER SIDE OF NEGOTIATION
What makes this simulation interesting, however,
lies not in the details of the case but in the top-secret
instructions given to one side of each pairing before
the exercise begins: “Please start the negotiation with
a display of anger. You must display anger for a minimum of 10 minutes at the beginning.” The instructions go on to give specific tips for showing anger:
Interrupt the other party. Call her “unfair” or “unreasonable.” Blame her personally for the disagreement.
Raise your voice.
Before the negotiations begin, I spread the pairs
all over the building so that the students can’t see
how others are behaving. Then, as the pairs negotiate, I walk around and observe. Although some students struggle, many are spectacularly good at feigning anger. They wag a finger in their partner’s face.
They pace around. I’ve never seen the exercise result
in a physical confrontation—but it has come close.
Some of the negotiators who did not get the secret instructions react by trying to defuse the other person’s
anger. But some react angrily themselves—and it’s
amazing how quickly the emotional responses escalate. When I bring everyone back into the classroom
after 30 minutes, there are always students still yelling at each other or shaking their heads in disbelief.
During the debriefing, we survey the pairs to see
how angry they felt and how they fared in resolving the problem. Often, the more anger the parties
showed, the more likely it was that the negotiation
ended poorly—for example, in litigation or an impasse (no deal). Once I’ve clued the entire class in
on the setup, discussion invariably makes its way
to this key insight: Bringing anger to a negotiation is
like throwing a bomb into the process, and it’s apt to
have a profound effect on the outcome.
Until 20 years ago, few researchers paid much
attention to the role of emotions in negotiating—
how feelings can influence the way people overcome conflict, reach agreement, and create value
when dealing with another party. Instead, negotiation scholars focused primarily on strategy and
tactics—particularly the ways in which parties can
identify and consider alternatives, use leverage, and
execute the choreography of offers and counter­
offers. Scientific understanding of negotiation also
tended to home in on the transactional nature of
working out a deal: how to get the most money or
profit from the process. Even when experts started
looking at psychological influences on negotiations,
they focused on diffuse and nonspecific moods—
such as whether negotiators felt generally positive
or negative, and how that affected their behavior.
Over the past decade, however, researchers have
begun examining how specific emotions—anger,
sadness, disappointment, anxiety, envy, excitement,
and regret—can affect the behavior of negotiators.
They’ve studied the differences between what happens when people simply feel these emotions and
what happens when they also express them to the
other party through words or actions. In negotiations that are less transactional and involve parties
in long-term relationships, understanding the role
of emotions is even more important than it is in
transactional deal making.
This new branch of research is proving extremely
useful. We all have the ability to regulate how we experience emotions, and specific strategies can help us
improve tremendously in that regard. We also have
some control over the extent to which we express
our feelings—and again, there are specific ways to
cloak (or emphasize) an expression of emotion when
doing so may be advantageous. For instance, research shows that feeling or looking anxious results
in suboptimal negotiation outcomes. So individuals
who are prone to anxiety when brokering a deal can
take certain steps both to limit their nervousness and
to make it less obvious to their negotiation opponent.
The same is true for other emotions.
In the pages that follow, I discuss—and share coping strategies for—many of the emotions people typically feel over the course of a negotiation. Anxiety
is most likely to crop up before the process begins or
during its early stages. We’re prone to experience anger or excitement in the heat of the discussions. And
we’re most likely to feel disappointment, sadness, or
regret in the aftermath.
Bringing anger to a negotiation is like throwing
a bomb into the process, and it’s apt
to have a profound effect on the outcome.
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EMOTION AND THE ART OF NEGOTIATION HBR.ORG
Idea in Brief
THE PROBLEM
Negotiators typically focus
on strategy, tactics, offers,
and counteroffers and don’t
pay enough attention to how
emotions affect what happens
at the bargaining table.
Avoiding Anxiety
NEW FINDINGS
Research shows that we can
regulate the anxiety, anger,
excitement, disappointment, or
regret we may feel and express
in the course of a negotiation—
and doing so can help us make
better deals.
Anxiety is a state of distress in reaction to threatening
stimuli, particularly novel situations that have the
potential for undesirable outcomes. In contrast to
anger, which motivates people to escalate conflict
(the “fight” part of the fight-or-flight response),
anxiety trips the “flight” switch and makes people
want to exit the scene.
Because patience and persistence are often desirable when negotiating, the urge to exit quickly is
counterproductive. But the negative effects of feeling anxious while negotiating may go further. In my
recent research, I wondered if anxious negotiators
also develop low aspirations and expectations, which
could lead them to make timid first offers—a behavior
that directly predicts poor negotiating outcomes.
In work with Maurice Schweitzer in 2011, I explored how anxiety influences negotiations. First we
surveyed 185 professionals about the emotions they
expected to feel before negotiating with a stranger,
negotiating to buy a car, and negotiating to increase
their salary. When dealing with a stranger or asking
for a higher salary, anxiety was the dominant emotional expectation; when negotiating for the car,
anxiety was second only to excitement.
To understand how anxiety can affect negotiators, we then asked a separate group of 136 participants to negotiate a cell phone contract that required
agreeing on a purchase price, a warranty period, and
the length of the contract. We induced anxiety in half
the participants by having them listen to continuous
three-minute clips of the menacing theme music
from the film Psycho, while the other half listened
to pleasant music by Handel. (Researchers call this
“incidental” emotional manipulation, and it’s quite
powerful. Listening to the Psycho music is genuinely
uncomfortable: People’s palms get sweaty, and some
listeners become jumpy.)
RECOMMENDATIONS
Be aware of the emotions
that negotiators commonly
experience and how displays
of emotion may be perceived.
Then take specific steps to
respond. For example, feeling
or looking anxious weakens
your bargaining power, so
prepare and rehearse to stay
calm, or ask a third party to
negotiate for you.
In this experiment and three others, we found
that anxiety had a significant effect on how people
negotiated. People experiencing anxiety made
weaker first offers, responded more quickly to each
move the counterpart made, and were more likely
to exit negotiations early (even though their instructions clearly warned that exiting early would reduce the value they received from the negotiation).
Anxious negotiators made deals that were 12% less
financially attractive than those made by negotiators in the neutral group. We did discover one caveat,
however: People who gave themselves high ratings
in a survey on negotiating aptitude were less affected
by anxiety than others.
Those experiments examined what happens
when people feel anxious. But what happens when
they express that anxiety, making it clear to their
counterparts that they’re nervous (and perhaps vulnerable)? In 2012, with Francesca Gino and Maurice
Schweitzer, I conducted eight experiments to explore how anxious people behaved in situations in
which they could seek advice from others. We found
that relative to people who did not feel anxious, they
were less confident, more likely to consult others
when making decisions, and less able to discriminate between good and bad advice. In the most relevant of these experiments, we found that anxious
participants did not discount advice from someone
with a stated conflict of interest, whereas subjects
feeling neutral emotions looked upon that advice
skeptically. Although this research didn’t directly address how the subjects would negotiate, it suggests
that people who express anxiety are more likely to
be taken advantage of in a negotiation, especially if
the other party senses their distress.
Excellent negotiators often make their counterparts feel anxious on purpose. For example, on the
TV show Shark Tank, six wealthy investors (sharks)
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SPOTLIGHT ON THE SOFTER SIDE OF NEGOTIATION
negotiate with entrepreneurs hoping for funding.
The entrepreneurs must pitch their ideas in front of
a huge television audience and face questions from
the investors that are often aggressive and unnerving. As this is going on, stress-inducing music fills the
TV studio. This setup does more than create drama
and entertainment for viewers; it also intentionally
puts pressure on the entrepreneurs. The sharks are
professional negotiators who want to knock the entrepreneurs off balance so that it will be easier to take
ownership of their good ideas at the lowest price
possible. (When multiple sharks want to invest, they
often drop comments that are intended to make opposing investors anxious too.) If you watch the show
closely, you’ll probably notice a pattern: The entrepreneurs who seem least rattled by the environmental stressors tend to negotiate the most carefully and
deliberately—and often strike the best deals.
The takeaway from both research and practice
is clear: Try your utmost to avoid feeling anxious
while negotiating. How can you manage that? Train,
practice, rehearse, and keep sharpening your negotiating skills. Anxiety is often a response to novel
stimuli, so the more familiar the stimuli, the more
comfortable and the less anxious you will feel.
(That’s why clinicians who treat anxiety disorders
often rely on exposure therapy: People who are
nervous about flying on airplanes, for instance, are
progressively exposed to the experience, first getting used to the sights and sounds, then sitting in
airliner seats, and ultimately taking flights.) Indeed,
although many people enroll in negotiation classes
to learn strategies and increase skills, one of the
primary benefits is the comfort that comes from repeatedly practicing deal making in simulations and
exercises. Negotiation eventually feels more routine,
so it’s not such an anxiety-inducing experience.
Another useful strategy for reducing anxiety is to
bring in an outside expert to handle the bargaining.
Third-party negotiators will be less anxious because
their skills are better honed, the process is routine
for them, and they have a lower personal stake in the
outcome. Outsourcing your negotiation may sound
like a cop-out, but it’s a frequent practice in many
industries. Home buyers and sellers use real estate
brokers partly for their negotiating experience;
athletes, authors, actors, and even some business
executives rely on agents to hammer out contracts.
Although there are costs to this approach, they are
often more than offset by the more favorable terms
that can be achieved. And although anxious negotiators may have the most to gain from involving a third
party (because anxiety can be a particularly difficult
emotion to regulate in an uncomfortable setting),
this strategy can also be useful when other negative
emotions surface.
Managing Anger
Like anxiety, anger is a negative emotion, but instead of being self-focused, it’s usually directed
toward someone else. In most circumstances, we
try to keep our tempers in check. When it comes to
negotiating, however, many people believe that anger can be a productive emotion—one that will help
them win a larger share of the pie.
This view stems from a tendency to view negotiations in competitive terms rather than collaborative
ones. Researchers call this the fixed-pie bias: People,
particularly those with limited experience making
deals, assume that a negotiation is a zero-sum game
in which their own interests conflict directly with
a counterpart’s. (More-experienced negotiators, in
contrast, look for ways to expand the pie through
collaboration, rather than nakedly trying to snatch
a bigger slice.) Anger, the thinking goes, makes one
seem stronger, more powerful, and better able to
succeed in this grab for value.
In fact, there’s a body of research—much of it by
Keith Allred, a former faculty member at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government—that documents
the consequences of feeling angry while negotiating. This research shows that anger often harms the
A useful strategy for reducing anxiety is to bring
in an outside expert to handle the bargaining.
Third-party negotiators have better-honed skills
and a lower personal stake in the outcome.
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EMOTION AND THE ART OF NEGOTIATION HBR.ORG
Managing Your Counterpart’s Emotions
process by escalating conflict, biasing perceptions,
and making impasses more likely. It also reduces
joint gains, decreases cooperation, intensifies competitive behavior, and increases the rate at which
offers are rejected. Angry negotiators are less accurate than neutral negotiators both in recalling their
own interests and in judging other parties’ interests.
And angry negotiators may seek to harm or retaliate against their counterparts, even though a more
cooperative approach might increase the value that
both sides can claim from the negotiation.
Despite these findings, many people continue to
see advantages to feeling or appearing angry. Some
even attempt to turn up the volume on their anger,
because they think it will make them more effective
in a negotiation. In my own research, I have found
that given a choice between feeling angry and feeling happy while negotiating, more than half the participants want to be in an angry state and view it as
significantly advantageous.
There are cases when feeling angry can lead to
better outcomes. Research by Gerben van Kleef at
the University of Amsterdam demonstrates that in
a onetime, transactional negotiation with few opportunities to collaborate to create value, an angry
negotiator can wind up with a better deal. There may
even be situations in which a negotiator decides to
feign anger, because the counterpart, in an attempt
to defuse that anger, is likely to give ground on
terms. This might work well if you are haggling with
a stranger to buy a car, for example.
But negotiators who play this card must be aware
of the costs. Showing anger in a negotiation damages the long-term relationship between the parties. It reduces liking and trust. Research by Rachel
Campagna at the University of New Hampshire
shows that false representations of anger may generate small tactical benefits but also lead to considerable and persistent blowback. That is, faking anger
can create authentic feelings of anger, which in turn
diminish trust for both parties. Along the same lines,
research by Jeremy Yip and Martin Schweinsberg
demonstrates that people who encounter an angry
negotiator are more likely to walk away, preferring
to let the process end in a stalemate.
In many contexts, then, feeling or expressing
anger as a negotiating tactic can backfire. So in most
cases, tamping down any anger you feel—and limiting the anger you express—is a smarter strategy. This
may be hard to do, but there are tactics that can help.
Negotiating is an interpersonal process. There will always
be at least one other party (and often many more) involved.
In the adjoining article I discuss how to manage your own
emotions during a negotiation. But what about the other
people at the table? Can you manage their emotions as well?
I suggest two strategies for doing so.
1
Be observant. Perceiving how
other people are feeling is a
critical component of emotional
intelligence, and it’s particularly key
in negotiations (as Adam Galinsky
and his colleagues have found). So
tune in to your counterpart’s body
language, tone of voice, and choice
of words. When her verbal and
nonverbal cues don’t match up, ask
questions. For example, “You are
telling me you like this outcome,
but you seem uneasy. Is something
making you uncomfortable?” Or
“You say you’re angry, but you seem
somewhat pleased. Are you truly
upset about something? Or are you
trying to intimidate me?”
Asking pointed questions based
on your perceptions of the other
party’s emotional expressions will
make it easier for you to understand
her perspective (a task people are
shockingly bad at, according to
research by Nicholas Epley). It will
also make it difficult for a counterpart
to lie to you; evidence suggests that
people prefer to tell lies of omission
about facts rather than lies of
commission about feelings.
2
Don’t be afraid to exert
direct influence on your
counterpart’s emotions. This
may sound manipulative or even
unscrupulous, but you can use this
influence for good. For example, if
your counterpart seems anxious or
angry, injecting humor or empathetic
reassurance can dramatically change
the tone of the interaction. By the
same token, if your counterpart
seems overconfident or pushy,
expressing well-placed anger can
inspire a healthy dose of fear.
In recent research with Elizabeth
Baily Wolf, I have found that it’s
possible to go even further in
managing others’ emotions: You
display an emotion, your counterpart
sees it, and then you shape his
interpretation of it. For example,
imagine that you start crying at
work. (Crying is a difficult-to-control
and often embarrassing behavior.)
Saying “I’m in tears because I’m
passionate” rather than “I’m sorry
I’m so emotional” can completely
change the way others react and
the way they view your self-control
and competence.
Building rapport before, during, and after a negotiation can reduce the odds that the other party
will become angry. If you seek to frame the negotiation cooperatively—to make it clear that you’re
seeking a win-win solution instead of…
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