Negotiation Chapter 9:Managing Difficult Negotiations: Individual Approaches

Chapter 9: Managing Difficult Negotiations: Individual Approaches

When negotiations become difficult to resolve, problems may be traced to one or more of following causal elements:
- Characteristics of the way parties perceive themselve or other negotiators.
- Characteristics of the dontent of their communication.
- Characteristics in the process used to negotiator or manage conflict.
- Characteristics of the context of their negotiation.

Strategies for resolving impasse: Joint approaches There are three components:
Cognitive resolution. - to change how the parties view the situation.
Emotional resolution. – the way the parties feel about the impasse and the other party, and the amount of emotional energy they put into the negotiation.
Behavioral resolution. – processes address exactly what people will do in the future, and what agreement they make about how the future will be realized.

There are five major conflict-reduction strategies that can be used to resolve impasses:
Reducing tension and synchronizing de-escalation by seperating the parties(break-off face-to-face relations), tension release, acknowledging the other’s feeling:active listening, and synchronized de-escalation,
Improving the accuracy of communication by role reversal : can help negotiators to put themselves in the other psrty’s shoes and look at the issue from his or her perspective.
Controlling issues – “Fractionating” is a method of issue control that involves dividing a large conflict into small parts : 1)reduce the number of parties on each side, 2) control the number of substantive issues involved, 3) state issues in concrete terms rather than as (general) principles, 4)restrict the procedents involved, both procedural and substantive, 5) searching for ways to fractionate the big issues, and 6) depersonalize issues: separate them from the parties advocating them.
Establishing common ground – Several approaches are possible: establishing common goals, aligning against common enemies, agreeing to follow a common procedure, or establishing a common framework for approaching the negotiation problems.
Enhancing the desirability of options to the other party – There are several alternative strategies: give the other party a “yesable” proposal, ask for a different decision, sweeten the offer rather than intensifying the threat, and use legitimacy or objective criteria to evaluate solutions.

Mismatched models : intentional and otherwise
Responding to the other side’s hard distributive tactics – mean the distributive tactics that the other party applies in anegotiation to put pressure on negotiators to do something that is not in their best interest to do. As a pressured party you can respond to these tactics by: ignore them, cal them on it, respond in kind, and offer to change to more productive methods.
Responding when the other side has more power – when dealing with a party with more power, negotiators have at least four alternatives : protect themselves, cultivate their best alternative(BETNA), formulate a “trip wire alert system”, and correct the power imbalance.
The special problem of handling ultimatums – An altimatum is an attempt “to induce complisnce or force concessions from s presumsbly recalcitrant opponents.” Ultimatums typically have three components: 1)demand, 2) an attempt to create a sense of urgency, 3) a threat of punishment if compliance does not occurs.
Responding when the other side is being difficult