NEGOTIATION

Negotiation Styles and Communication

Negotiating Styles and Communication

Introduction

For the purpose and objective of understanding and comprehending the accounts of communication and negotiations, we shall pave way for the aim to decipher effective and efficient managers, comprising capabilities of negotiations.

To understand the accounts of buyers that exist in the market, three broad categories exist in the midst of negotiation (Dinh, 2009). These are price buyers, which focus on more-for-less value proposition, skewing towards the low-cost provider; relationship buyers, which have specific clients from whom they buy and create association with one specific brand and pertain to be fairly satisfied with that brand alone. Finally we have the value buyers, who are generally labeled integrative bargainers who, although are willing to pay an extra price for the product, but would create liaison and relationship with the best-cost provider (Dinh, 2009).

Defining Negotiation

Negotiations are a pervasive activity in human relations, including family and social life as well as legal, business, political, military, and diplomatic affairs. Scholars from all of these fields and others, including psychology and communication, have developed unique approaches to analyzing and teaching negotiation. The systematic study of negotiation has expanded and flourished across several disciplines, most notably since the early 1970s. Some reasons for the increased interdisciplinary interest in negotiation include overburdened courts, interdependence, competition, the information age, and globalization (Babcock & Laschever, 2003). Additionally, the study of negotiation as a process has grown out of an emerging consensus around the “idea that conflicts often could be restructured and reframed so that partisans would regard conflict as a shared problem that had mutually acceptable solutions”. Although there is voluminous and varied literature on the history, significance, and theory of negotiation from different disciplinary perspectives, a common core of concepts has been identified as foundational across the canon of negotiation (Dinh, 2009).

Distributive and Integrative Negotiation

Distributive bargaining assumes a limited and fixed pool of resources to be divided. The goals of opposing parties in distributive negotiation are in direct conflict—a win for one side is a loss for the other. In the language of game theory or economics, the parties are in a zero-sum or constant sum interaction. Because the resource “pie” is fixed, relative gains are prized. Inevitable conflict is assumed, rather than possible cooperation.

In integrative negotiations, the pool of resources is not seen as fixed and limited but as variable and expandable. This means that integrative “negotiations are ...