Interests, Rights and Power

Roman Sheremeta, Ph.D.

Professor, Weatherhead School of Management

Case Western Reserve University

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Exercise: Rules

• Exercise: Eazy's Garage
• Two-person negotiation over a potential conflict resolution.
• A car owner: Frances Litchfield.
• A car repair shop: Jim Eazer.

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• Rules:
• You will be randomly assigned a role.
• You will have 30 minutes to read the instructions.
• You will be matched with somebody else in the other role.
• You will have 30 minutes to reach a deal.
• All signed contracts must be submitted before the deadline.

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Exercise: Role Assignment

• Roles:
• Frances Litchfield = odd number (1, 3, 5, …)
• Jim Eazer = even number (2, 4, 6, …)

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Exercise: Short Debriefing

• Frances Litchfield, a car owner:
• Introduce your role.
• Why do you want to resolve the conflict?

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• Jim Eazer, the owner of a car repair shop:
• Introduce your role.
• Why do you want to resolve the conflict?

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Interests, Rights and Power

• There are three approaches to the process of conflict resolution.

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• Interests-based negotiators:
• Attempt to learn about the other’s underlying needs, desires, and concerns.
• Attempt to reconcile different interests among parties.

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• Rights-based negotiators:
• Apply standards of fairness to an analysis of negotiation.
• May include terms specified by contracts, legal rights, precedent, or expectations based upon norms.

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• Power-based negotiators:
• Use status, rank, threats, and intimidation to get their way.

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Exercise: Litchfield

• What is Litchfield’s target?
• Target: $1,005.

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• What is Litchfield’s BATNA?
• Go to court.

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• What are Litchfield’s interests?
• Put this dispute behind, maintain good reputation.

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• What are Litchfield’s rights?
• As a customer, she has a right to be treated fairly.

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• What is Litchfield’s power?
• Tell friends and patients that Eazer’s Garage deals unethically with its costumers.

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Exercise: Eazer

• What is Eazer’s target?
• Target: $1,510 ($1,640).

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• What is Eazer’s BATNA?
• Go to court (Litchfield broke the law).

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• What are Eazer’s interests?
• Put this dispute behind, maintain good reputation, get paid for the work done.

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• What are Eazer’s rights?
• Get paid for the work his repair shop did.

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• What is Eazer’s power?
• File a law suit against Litchfield.

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Exercise: Bargaining Zone

• Possible settlement:
• Between the two targets.
• Between $1,005 and $1,510 ($1,640).

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• Some possible integrative components:
• Showing respect to one another.
• Future relationship (long-term service agreement for the car).
• Trade-off current interests for future benefits.
• Address the issue of broken trust and how to avoid it in the future (maybe write an explicit contract).

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Exercise: Closing the Deal

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Exercise: Other Issues

• When negotiating, did you focus on:
• Your interests?
• Your rights?
• Your power?

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• How did you control your emotions?

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• Anger manipulation:
• “Please start off the negotiation with a display of anger and then use your skills to diffuse the situation later. You must display anger for a minimum of 10 minutes at the beginning of negotiation. If the other party appears accommodating to your demands or starts to make concessions, keep the pressure on and asking for more!”

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The Principle of Reciprocity

• The style you use in negotiation will often be reciprocated:
• 42% of times interests are reciprocated.
• 27% of times power is reciprocated.
• 22% of times rights are reciprocated.

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Strategies for Using Interests, Rights and Power

• Strategy 1: Focus on interests.
• Focusing on interests can usually resolve conflicts better than focusing on rights and power.
• Interests are especially effective for pie expansion.

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• Strategy 2: Refocus your opponent away from rights and power.
• Don’t reciprocate with rights and power.
• Don’t get personal and use self-discipline (separate the person from the problem).
• Lets talk (say for 20 minutes) and then fight.
• Don’t reward the other party if they keep on bringing rights and power.

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Strategies for Using Interests, Rights and Power

• Strategy 3: Use rights and power only when it is necessary.
• When the other party refuses to come to the table.
• When negotiations have broken down and parties are at an impasse.
• When someone violates a rule or breaks the law.

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• Strategy 4: Use rights and power strategically.
• There are high costs associated with using rights and power, as it always leaves at least one person as a looser.
• Rights are less costly than power since power creates a desire for revenge.
• Make sure that your threat is credible.
• Threaten the other party’s interests.

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Be Careful When Exercising Power

• The West Wing
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mETgb-fPRo

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Negotiation Biases

• Cognitive biases are mental errors caused by our simplified information processing strategies:
• Overconfidence.
• Agreement bias.
• Anchoring bias.
• Incompatibility bias.
• Fixed-pie bias.
• Confirmation bias.
• Self-serving bias.
• Availability heuristic.
• In-group bias.
• Exaggeration of conflict bias.

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Exaggeration of Conflict Bias

• Exaggeration of conflict bias:
• People involved in a conflict tend to overestimate the extremity of the other side’s beliefs.
• Example: Conservatives think that liberals are even more liberal than they actually are, and the vice versa.

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• Rationality behind the “exaggeration of conflict.”
• Each party tends to see the other party ’s position as more extreme than it really is.
• One’s own side is also seen as more extreme than it really is.

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• Potential solutions:
• Objective evaluation.
• Mediators.

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Emotions

• Emotion is a conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.

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• What do we know about emotions?
• Emotions are relatively short-lived (in contrast to moods).
• Emotions are usually triggered by an identifiable event or brought on as a means of achieving a goal.
• Emotions can be communicated convincingly to the other party.
• Emotions can be used strategically in negotiations if negotiators can control their behavioral emotional display during social interactions.

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Emotional Styles

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Research on Emotional Styles

• Kopelman et al. (2006) design three laboratory experiments testing the influence of strategically displaying positive, negative, and rational (neutral) emotions on negotiation outcomes.

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• Potential impact of different emotions:
• Positive emotions and good mood can be effective, by increasing cooperative tactics and enhancing the quality of agreements.
• Negative emotions can be effective, by positioning the negotiator in a favorable more dominant position, as well as ineffective, by escalating the conflict.

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Experiment 1: Negotiation Exercise

• Experiment 1: Participants received instructions that coached them to display emotions in a negotiation exercise:
• Positive emotions (avoiding hostility, creating positive relationships, and framing the negotiation as a partnership).
• Negative emotions (being persistent and tough, beginning with extreme positions, employing negative reinforcement).
• Rational (neutral) emotions (a rational bargaining style by controlling their emotional display, making strategic decisions, being professional).

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• Findings:
• Conflict resolution rates were similar across the three strategic emotional displays.
• Participants experiencing negative emotional display had a lower regard for preserving the future business relationship than participants experiencing positive emotional display (74% versus 92%).

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Experiment 2: Ultimatum Bargaining Game

• Experiment 2: Participants in a role of Responder had to make an accept/reject decision after viewing a professional actor playing the role of the business manager displaying emotions:
• Positive emotions.
• Negative emotions.
• Rational emotions.

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• Findings:
• Participants were less likely to accept the proposal offered by a business manager displaying negative emotion (26%) relatively to positive emotion (53%) or neutral emotion (56%).
• Participants were less willing to pay a demanded settlement when faced with a business manager displaying negative emotions.

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Experiment 3: Ultimatum Bargaining Game

• Experiment 3: Participants in a role of Proposer had to make a counteroffer after viewing a professional actor playing the role of the business manager displaying emotions:
• Positive emotions.
• Negative emotions.
• Rational emotions.

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• Findings:
• Participants made lower counteroffers to a business manager displaying negative emotion.
• Participants were less concerned about the outcome of negotiation when facing a business manager displaying negative emotion.

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Strategies for Using Emotions

• Strategy 5: Display positive and rational emotions.
• All three experiments of Kopelman et al. (2006) highlight the advantage of behaviorally displaying positive (and rational) in contrast to negative emotions.

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Thank you!

Roman Sheremeta, Ph.D.

Professor, Weatherhead School of Management

Case Western Reserve University

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References

• Thompson, L. (2004). The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. (Chapter 5)
• Posner, J. Russell, J.A., & Peterson, B.S. (2005). The circumplex model of affect: Anintegrative approach to affective neuroscience, cognitive development, and psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology ,17, 715–734.
• Schniter, E., Sheremeta, R.M., & Shields, T. (2015). Conflicted Emotions Following Trust-Based Interaction. Journal of Economic Psychology, 51, 48-65.
• Watson, D., Clark, L.A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063.
• Kopelman, S., Rosette, A.S., & Thompson, L. (2006). The three faces of Eve: Strategic displays of positive, negative, and neutral emotions in negotiations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 99, 81-101.
• Lindner, E.G. (2006). Emotion and conflict: Why it is important to understand how emotions affect conflict and how conflict affects emotions. The handbook of conflict resolution: Theory and practice, 268-293.

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