Emotions in negotiations

Abstract or 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 have become a valuable instrument both for managerial and operational
decision-making within a corporation. Externally, recurring negotiations with businesspeople
around the globe have 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 negotiating
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 negotiations
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.