Essential of Negotiation VIIII

Chapter Nine: Managing Difficult Negotiation Individual Approaches

Summary:

This chapter discussed about the situation where negotiations become especially difficult, often to the point of stalemate or breakdown. The negotiation is a conflict management process, and all conflict situations have the potential for becoming derailed. Perceptions become distorted, and judgments are biased. Destructive conflict processes override the negotiation, and the parties cannot proceed. The negotiations become difficult to resolve in according to the characteristics of the way parties perceive, the content of the communication, the process used to negotiate or manage conflict, and the context of the negotiation. This chapter focused on three major sections.

In the first section, this chapter discussed about the nature of the negotiation, examine the causes of stalemate, impasse, or breakdown, and explore the characteristics of the difficult negotiations, including characteristics of the parties, the types of issues involved, and the process in play. Initially, we need to know the characteristics of the negotiations which are difficult to resolve. The process of conflict resolution is characterized by the atmosphere, channels of communication, unclear definition of original issues, the great differences in the respective positions, the locked initial negotiating positions, and the hidden dissension in the same group or side.

In the second section, this chapter talked about the specific actions that the parties can take jointly to try to move the conflict back to a level where successful negotiation and conflict resolution can ensure. There are five strategies to resolve impasses:

• Reducing tension and synchronizing de-escalation by separating the parties, tension releasing, acknowledging the other’s feeling through active listening, and synchronizing de-escalation.
• Improving the accuracy of communication through role reversal, and imaging.
• Controlling issues by reducing the number of parties on each side, controlling the number of substantive issues involved, stating issues in concrete terms rather than as (General) principles, restricting the precedents involved both procedural and substantive, searching for ways to fractionate the big issues, and depersonalizing issues.
• Establishing common ground by super ordinate goals, common enemies, common expectation, manage time constraints and deadlines, reframe the parties’ view of each other, and build an integrative framework.
• Enhancing the desirability of options to the other party by giving the other party a “yesable” proposal, asking for a different decision, sweetening the offer rather than intensifying the threat, and using legitimacy or objective criteria to evaluate solutions.

Finally, the third section discussed mismatched situation where one party wants to negotiate to an integrative resolution, and the other party is being “difficult”- and hence, what the integrative party can do to draw the other into a more constructive process. There are at least four challenges exist as follow:

• Responding to the other side’s hard distributive tactics by ignoring them, calling them on it, responding in a kind, and offering to change to more productive methods.
• Responding when the other side has more power, the negotiators can protect themselves, cultivate their best alternative (BATNA), formulate a “trip wire alert system”, and correct the power imbalance.
• The special problem of handling ultimatums (The ultimatums have three components: a demand, an attempt to create a sense of urgency, and a threat of punishment if compliance does not occur)
• Responding when the other side is being difficult