Summarize Essential of Negotiation Chapter 9: Managing Difficult Negotiations: Individual Approaches

This chapter focuses on situations where negotiations become especially difficult, often to the point of stalemate or breakdown. Breakdowns in communication, escalation of anger and mistrust, polarization of positions and refusal to compromise, the issuance of ultimatums, or even the avoidance of conflict—negotiations often hit an impasse. Productive dialogue stops. The parties may continue talking, but the communication is usually characterized by trying to sell or force one’s own position, talking about the other’s unreasonable position and uncooperative behavior, or both. When these breakdowns occur, the parties may simply agree to recess, cool off, and come back tomorrow. The fist step should be some effort at reducing tension, followed by efforts to improve the accuracy of communication and to control the proliferation of issues. Finally, the parties should engage in techniques for establishing commonalities and enhancing the attractiveness of each other’s preferred alternatives.
This chapter explored five major strategies that parties could use to attempt to resolve a dispute on their own:
• Reduce tension by separating themselves from one another through cooling-off periods, talking about emotions and feelings, or attempting to synchronize de-escalation of the conflict.
• Improve the accuracy of communication by role reversal or mirroring the other’s statements.
• Keep the number of issues under control so that issues are managed effectively, new issues are not carelessly added, and large issues are divided into smaller ones.
• Search for common ground through exploring superordinate goals, common enemies, creating common ground rules and effective time management, developing common expectations through a “covenant”, and reframing.
• Enhancing the desirability of the options and alternatives for both parties by providing “yesable” proposal, asking for different decisions, sweetening offers, and using objective criteria to evaluate solutions.
We address methods negotiators can use when dealing with an intentionally difficult party.
Responding to the Other Side’s Hard Distributive Tactics. To summarize briefly, as a pressured party you can respond to these tactics in any of these ways:
1. Ignore them.
2. Call them on it.
3. Respond in kind.
4. 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. They can
1. Protect themselves.
2. Cultivate their best alternative (BATNA)
3. Formulate a “trip wire alert system.”
4. Correct the power imbalance.
The tools that we discussed are broad in function and in application, and they represent self-help for negotiators in dealing with stalled or problematic exchanges. None of these methods and remedies is a panacea, and each should be chosen and applied with sensitivity to the needs and limitations of the situations and of the negotiators involved. A truly confrontational breakdown, especially one that involves agreements of great impact or importance, sometimes justifies the introduction of individuals or agencies who themselves are not party to the dispute.