Negotiation Styles

Negotiation Styles

We negotiate multiple times every day in encounters with others. Negotiation occurs when two or more parties have conflicting goals or interests.

Reflect on the past week and identify an instance where you negotiated with someone—at home, at work, or anytime you had contact with another person. For the first paragraph of your initial post, describe the negotiation event, including the participants, the key issues, and the outcome.

For the second part of your initial post, evaluate one of the following starter bullet points, using research on course concepts to inform your analysis:

• Negotiators tend to have consistent styles. How would you assess your style in the negotiation? How would you assess the style of the other party? How might your style have been different had you been negotiating the same issue with a different person?
• Was your negotiation an example of distributive negotiation or integrative negotiation? Was each party engaged in the negotiation using the same approach? What behaviors existed that demonstrated the approach? What advantages or disadvantages might have emerged if a different approach (distributive versus integrative) had been used?
• What other outcome alternatives might have been possible, and how might they have influenced the actual outcome? How did the parties determine what other alternatives exist? How did the parties determine which alternative to use?
• How might each party assess the outcome of the negotiation? Does each party view it as successful? What is the basis for evaluating how parties view the outcome? What did each party do to achieve success in the negotiation?
• Negotiations have a reputation for being secretive actions with overtones of espionage, mistrust, and strategizing. What are the positives and negatives of sharing your strategies or your desired point of settlement with the other person in a negotiation? How did the level of secrecy or sharing impact the negotiation process and outcome in your example? What behaviors demonstrated the level of secrecy and sharing that existed?
• The desired outcome in a negotiation is to achieve the goal you want. What can opposing parties in a negotiation do to identify their common points and minimize their differences? Analyze how your negotiation example might have had a better-negotiated outcome if common points had been enhanced and differences minimized during the negotiation.