Emotion and the Art of Negotiation. Idea in Brief. The Problem. Negotiators typically focus on strategy, tactics, offers, and counteroffers and don. 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. It is, without question, my favorite day of the semester. They learn that the two parties signed a detailed contract eight months earlier, but now they. 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. You must display anger for a minimum of 1. Raise your voice. Before the negotiations begin, I spread the pairs all over the building so that the students can. Then, as the pairs negotiate, I walk around and observe. Although some students struggle, many are spectacularly good at feigning anger.
Emotions are what people feel. In terms of evolution.They wag a finger in their partner. Some of the negotiators who did not get the secret instructions react by trying to defuse the other person. But some react angrily themselves. When I bring everyone back into the classroom after 3. 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. Download the 'Emotions of Normal People' ebook for FREE. Read and write reviews and more. Emotion What is emotion? Then what is a feeling? These terms are difficult to define and even more difficult to understand completely. Emotions/Feelings: Participants. Explain that stress is a normal emotion and is part of being human. Instead, negotiation scholars focused primarily on strategy and tactics. 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. 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. 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. Anxiety is most likely to crop up before the process begins or during its early stages. In contrast to anger, which motivates people to escalate conflict (the . 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. First we surveyed 1. 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 1. 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. Listening to the Psycho music is genuinely uncomfortable: People. 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 1. 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? In 2. 01. 2, 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. For example, on the TV show Shark Tank, six wealthy investors (sharks) 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. 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. Negotiation eventually feels more routine, so it. 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. 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. 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. 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. This research shows that anger often harms the 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. 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. This may be hard to do, but there are tactics that can help. 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. If the other party does become angry, apologize. Even if you feel that his anger is unwarranted, recognize that you. So if tensions are flaring, ask for a break, cool off, and regroup. Resist that urge and give the anger time to dissipate. In heated negotiations, hitting the pause button can be the smartest play. Finally, you might consider reframing anger as sadness.
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