Contents

1  Introduction  3

2  Fear  4

2.1  Cognitive Appraisal  4

3  Anger  5

3.1  Implications  6

3.1.1  Threats  6

4  Envy  7

4.1  Implications  8

5  A Universal Approach: The EASI Model  9

5.1  Implications  10

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1 Introduction

With day-to-day meetings and constant communication, the modern business world is changing the ways of interpersonal interaction. Especially in flat hierarchies, negotiations serve an important role in resolving conflict situations and has become a valuable instrument both for managerial and opera- tional decision-making within a corporation. Externally, recurring negotiations with businesspeople around the globe has become a standard. Though negotiation skills are highly needed, many people rely on their experience from former negotiations and never have thought of using certain strategies or methods. Few may have read books on strategies in negotiations and apply them in real nego- tiating events such as compensation bargaining, promotions or business meetings. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to adapt to various negotiation settings, such as differing power among participants, external and internal negotiations and short- or long-term negotiations as well.

A good negotiator knows what patterns of behavior to induce in others by using emotions as a tool

to reach his goal. While there are some promising approaches, which can help to realize increased joint gains, many exclude emotions as an important way of carrying information. You may even find advice (esp. in the pre-1990s) proposing to avoid the use of emotions, either intrapersonal or interpersonal. The lack of research in this field has been covered since then and is progressing at a high pace. The following essay introduces the most prevalent and important emotions in negotia- tions and gives useful tips on how to capitalize on both the negative and positive effects of emotions such as fear, anger and envy. This is done both on an intrapersonal as well as an interpersonal level. Ultimately, the EASI model is presented, which provides a universal approach for strategies and tactics regarding emotions which are not necessarily covered here, but also play an important role in negotiations.

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2 Fear

Fear is the emotional response to danger, both tangible and realistic. In negotiations, fear occurs either during the process itself or prior to it. It manifests itself in stress, which is why most people tend to avoid social interactions like negotiations, especially when there is an apparent asymmetry in bargaining power or the type of the negotiation is to aim for ’independent advantage’ – when every participant tries to reach his goals, no matter what the consequences for the other parties might be – rather than to try to reach an agreement or compromise.

In business, many situations come to mind when thinking of fear-driven negotiations: fear of losing the job, fear of getting a wage-cut, fear of not being able to jump in one’s career – almost everybody was in these situations at one point in his life. While some people would say that they aren’t feeling any fear, the underlying processes are at least very similar to what the term ’fear’ implies. This is because the employee negotiates on his own behalf, while the superior is often bargaining as an agent. Research has shown (K. O’Connor, J.A. Arnold, 2006) that negotiating on one’s one behalf is evaluated as being significantly more stressful than other types of social interactions (especially debating and bargaining as an agent). The cause for a negotiation for being regarded as an especially stressful activity is the ambivalence of whether the negotiator anticipates the bargaining to be a threat or a challenge. The expection of a threat impedes the individual’s performance as he or she will be more willing to make concessions to his or her opponent, while the appraisal of a challenge leads to competitive or cooperative behavior, thus increasing the negotiator’s performance and result. The exact processes and implications of this hypothesis are covered in the next paragraph.

2.1 Cognitive Appraisal

K. O’Connor and J.A. Arnold introduce the concept of ’cognitive appraisal’ in their research, hy- pothesizing that the negotiator’s judgement of the demands of the situation would directly induce the performance of the negotiator. Thus a negotiation is regarded as a threat when the participant feels that he doesn’t have the resources making him capable of having a stand in the situation, re- gardless of the real conditions of the negotiation. This is leading to the use of tactics which impede a beneficial outcome – especially in negotiations with integrative potential. The effects of the threat appraisal have nothing to do with the individual ’negotiation skill’, but trigger a certain pattern of intentions and motives which are counteracting the way an integrative negotiation is supposed to work. This way, individuals who regarded a negotiation as a threat systematically found themselves to have scored a lower result than they could have, derived from their resources and positions.

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