Posted February 18th, 2016 by PON Staff & filed under BATNA.
If you’re thinking about buying a house, one of your first moves may be to choose a real estate agent who can advise you through the process. If you want a big-name publisher to buy your book, you probably will try to sign on an experienced literary agent as your counselor and advocate. Less formally, … Read
Some negotiators seem to believe that hard-bargaining tactics are the key to success. They resort to threats, extreme demands, and even unethical behavior to try to get the upper hand in a negotiation.
In fact, negotiators who fall back on hard-bargaining strategies in negotiation are typically betraying a lack of understanding about the gains that can be achieved in most business negotiations. When negotiators resort to hard-bargaining tactics, they convey that they view negotiation as a win-lose enterprise. A small percentage of business negotiations that concern only one issue, such as price, can indeed be viewed as win-lose negotiations, or distributive negotiations.
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Competitive negotiators frequently use tactics which others view as "unethical", in that these tactics either violate standards of truth telling or violate the perceived rules of negotiation. This paper sought to determine how business students viewed a number of marginally ethical negotiating tactics, and to determine the underlying factor structure of these tactics. The factor analysis of these tactics revealed five clear factors which were highly similar across the two samples, and which parallel [to a moderate degree] categories of tactics proposed by earlier theory. Data from one sample also permitted comparisons of the appropriateness of certain tactics across gender, nationality, ethnic origin and perception of one's negotiating style.
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- Roy J. Lewicki
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- Robert J. Robinson
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Lewicki, R.J., Robinson, R.J. Ethical and Unethical Bargaining Tactics: An Empirical Study. Journal of Business Ethics 17, 665–682 [1998]. //doi.org/10.1023/A:1005719122519