Research on the Art of Negotiation
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In a year 2000 article published in the Annual Review of Psychology, Harvard Business School Professor Kathleen L. Valley and Senior Research Fellow Max H. Bazerman, with colleagues Jared R. Curhan and Don A. Moore, synthesized negotiation studies to date, and pinpointed five emerging areas of thought.
For the full article on this effort, see the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article The Emerging Art of Negotiation.
We provide only the executive summary here.
1. Preconceptions Count
"Almost everyone who walks into a negotiation," say the authors, "already holds a fairly strong preconception of how they expect it to go down. How such . . . 'mental models' actually control the outcome of a negotiation is one of the important new areas of investigation."
Experiments have shown that the degree of cooperation among participants was affected far more by what the game was called—the "Community Game" or "Wall Street Game"—than by the individual dispositions of the participants.
2. Ethical Behavior
Laboratory research on negotiation ethics is beginning to reveal the flexibility and ambiguity in "standards" applied by negotiation "players."
Once again confirming what common sense tells us, researchers are finding that people see themselves as more ethical than the next person, but justify their own ethically questionable behavior as self-defense.
Hence the term "defense budget" as we wage a preemptive war against, well, not against Iraq exactly, but against the present chaos there.
3. Face-to-Face, Phone or E-mail?
Once again confirming that which we already know, researchers have found that face-to-face meetings foster rapport and offer fewer openings for misunderstanding and deceit.
Although email promotes miscommunication and hurt feelings, because it lacks "social context cues," it is more egalitarian, permitting more people from the "lower ranks" to express themselves more often and in greater detail.
4. Crossing Cultures
Though there is a substantial body of research on negotitions between individualistic and collectivist cultures, less research attention has addressed power distance (how social hierarchies affect negotiation), communication context, and different conceptions of time (sequential or simultaneous, for instance).
5. Multi-Party Negotiations
Experiments indicate that negotiating teams can have distinct advantages, including enhanced capability to exchange information and generate high quality ideas. This has certainly been my experience in multi-party negotiations, particularly those that I have co-mediated with judicial officers.
Conclusion
As the authors stress in their conclusion, "We hope that these multiple lenses can create a more unified understanding, so that psychology can help the world overcome barriers to effective negotiation behavior."
