Integrative and Distributive Negotiation Experiences
This week’s assignment aims to help you better understand your own orientations and inclinations in negotiation situations.
Combining this week’s material with last week’s discussion, we’ve seen several approaches to explaining negotiation behavior. Moore’s two-dimensional description of conflict strategies (Macfarlane text, 2-6) is often used to explain behavior in negotiation (with the ‘conflict strategies’ becoming ‘negotiation strategies’). We have learned about integrative and distributive approaches, and considered the value of competition and cooperation. In “Getting to Yes”, we have been exposed to two more categorizations of people’s behavior in negotiation: the ‘hard’/’soft’ divide and the approaches of interest-based negotiation as opposed to positional bargaining.
In order to best understand our own negotiating behavior, we need to explore these approaches to negotiation on two levels:
The first level is that of personal orientation. As you have probably sensed while reading, people differ in their intuitive approach to negotiation. Faced with a decision juncture in a negotiation process, some of us instinctively lean towards a next move that is cooperative in nature, and others lean towards a next move which is demanding or competitive. Some of us prefer to avoid negotiation altogether, when we can get away with it – and others are always on the lookout for an opportunity to interact and gain an edge. This orientation, or instinctive leaning, toward one type of negotiation behavior or another has little to do with our rational thinking process, and much more to do with the unspoken way that we approach and view the world.
The second level is that of strategic choice. Personal orientation notwithstanding, negotiation processes provide us, recurrently, with junctures at which we need to assess what is going on, our opposite party, and our needs, and make decisions. When we are aware of these junctures, we attempt to consciously choose a strategy that seems best suited to the situation – regardless of whether or not it is in line with our intuitive approach.
This assignment will enable us to address these two levels which affect our negotiation behavior.
Part I: Choose three negotiation situations you have participated in.
•The first should be a situation in which you consider you took an approach located on the competitive/distributive/positional side of the behavior spectrum:
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