Negotiation Skills

Introduction

In todays competitive scenario every individual wants a healthy working ambiance within workplace, universities, friends circle and every circle of society he/she comes into interaction with. Conflicts are inevitable dynamics of life that exists through-out the environments of all kinds. No matter how hard you try to avoid coming into contact with potential conflicts, if you work with people the chances, that you'll have to deal with potential conflicts are enormous. Negotiations are required at every level of the workplace environment, hence the employees must be trained adequately.

Discussion

According to Gent and Shannon, a negotiation in linked with conflict which is an outcome of opposing interests, it surfaces when one or more perspectives, values and opinions are opposing, contradictory or conflicting in nature and have not yet been agreed upon or aligned yet (Gent and Shannon, 2009). In work places the negotiation may be highly personal (revolving around differences in mental approaches, race, ethnic values, moral values, religious values etc) or highly official (revolving around decision making processes, scare resources, administrative processes, goal divergence etc).

In the article Negotiation Skills: Success Tips, several strategies to sort conflicts out using negotiations have been described. These are precisely the following:

Identifying and acknowledging the reason of conflict

Showing empathy during conflict

Putting your self in other's shoes during conflict

Being realistic, rational and fact-based

Solving conflict within the confines of decency

Starting with distributive bargaining one can figure out that even though all these negotiation strategies do fit in the criteria, they fit with a slightly different dimension. Distributive bargain takes place when two parties are in conflict to gain access to a limited resource. This typically happens in organizations when it comes to tenders and money. Here, as described in the article, getting your facts and figures right and being practical is the most important thing. However identifying the reason in usually not important because reason is pretty much obvious.

Here by Competitor style will be used and one must not show empathy towards the opposite party as it all about competition. It is classified by the force and strength the individual will use to make other agree with his or her thought. The individual becomes demanding and can take approaches like verbal attacks, manipulation or coercion and even physical attacks at times. The style is exemplified by an individual who ambitiously realizes his goals at the expense of others. To the person taking this approach, wining and loosing is a matter of value whereby winning signifies his strength and loosing in indicates his weaknesses. Winning is the primary objective of competitor. As the article says that you can agree or disagree with what other party says but you have to show empathy and try to understand their situation- this does not work for in distributive bargaining because If you shoe empathy you might lose your own vision and goal where as the core purpose of distributive bargaining is to win in the end and attain your goal of negotiation.

Then comes integrative strategy, where one sided winning ...