What is Negotiation and its Importance?
Negotiation is a two-ended dialog where minimum two parties meet with intent of resolving differences in their pre-settled mindset in order to gain advantage and produce an agreement on pre-defined course of actions. Parties mainly focus to gain advantage for themselves in negotiation by influencing the other party (Hatfield, R. C., & Mullis, 2015). Hence Negotiations always intended to achieve objective of settling down or compromise at mutual consent. Negotiation can be done in any dimension but it has more importance in business sector. This is a myth that negotiation happens if other party indicates about it, but the fact is that everything is negotiable. Some reasons of doing negotiations are bring change in existing relationships, buying someone’s time, analyze the strength of opposition and to name a few. But when all conditions are favorable for negotiation, still then some parties refuse to do so because of fear of premature decisions, comfortable in informal communications, lack of confidence in negotiation procedure. Despite of all these scenarios negotiation can be characterized as conflicts of interest between two parties, proceedings without protocols and intent for agreement over conflicts. Major part of any negotiation is communication (Bouwman, 2018).
Communication is a medium of exchanges messages that make sense to both ends via verbal or non-verbal motions. It exists in many forms like interrogating, advice, commands etc. depends upon the form performing by both groups as per their abilities. Good communication requires both verbal and non-verbal actions (Hatfield & Mullis, 2015). Any good negotiation can be cornerstones by good communication. Cultivating the ability to understand others and to listen well can also help to build a solid foundation for congenial and productive working relationships. Although nonverbal part plays very important role because communication consist 70% proportionate of non-verbal actions that includes body language, eye contact (Bouwman, 2018). Also speech plays a vital role in form of tone and voice quality with clarity of words recitation. Speaking of communication role in influencing negotiation deals, silence is a very powerful tool of communication (Hatfield & Mullis, 2015). It gives us favorable outcomes because it helps in manipulating words intentionally or unintentionally in order to gain advantage from the desired deal. Rudeness, criticism, swearing or sarcasm is the best examples of it (Malik & Yazar, 2016). Communication is a medium of transmitting information and information is a vital essence of any negotiation. In fact communication helps in stating better position at the time of negotiation. Lack of communication leads to various mistaken intent and breakdown issues and raise the risk of deadlock (Berger, 2016).
The Role of Communication in Negotiation
In the process of negotiation, communication facilitates tactical actions, exchanging information, surpassing strategic intentions and also helps in tracking behavior. In terms of negotiation communication focus on issues which are substantive in nature, offers, counter-offers, intangible & procedural issues and on interpersonal relationships of negotiations.
In order to execute an effective negotiation procedure, one must have strong communications skills (Hatfield & Mullis, 2015). To taste the essence of success in negotiations, it is very important to understand the role and importance of non-verbal communications skills and tactics of it to use it effectively to influence other party and gain advantage from the desired deal. Non-verbal communication is culturally bounded in negotiations (Luthans & Doh, 2018). The cultural identification of negotiators and the cultural context of negotiation will influence what non-verbal behavior is appropriate and how nonverbal behavior should be interpreted (Berger, 2016).
Successful negotiations need the acceptance of other party’s culture, interest, believes, education, mindset, perspective or ethnicity. It leads to interest in negotiation without agreeing on the other party’s interest. Its main objective is to extract the hassle-free solution from which no party has any objections (Chen & Tseng, 2016). Various illustrations have proved that “Negotiator’s communication skills influence the negotiation process and have favorable outcome” like in 2013 when Walt Disney acquired the whole operations of Lucasfilms, the original creator of Star Wars. Negotiator influenced George Lucas I such a way that he felt comfortable while selling Lucasfilms to Walt Disney because of his retirement plans and also felt the sense of security about his creation (Mircic?, 2014). This acquisition took place o 30th October 2013 and both parties agreed on mutual consent which gave Disney an uplifted ladder of brand name in animation industry and George felt secure when future plans of Star Wars has been shared with him. This negotiation took place successfully because negotiator influenced both parties as per their desired mindset (Berger, 2016).
Another very great example of Negotiation procedure is “Apple and US Publishers”- In the month of January 2010, a cluster of publishers negotiated a price model for e-books with apple in which they stated that they will give 30% sales commission to apple in lieu of no bar or restriction on settling price of their e-books. With this pricing model, publishers’ sensed improvement on their wholesale arrangement with company named Amazon but Amazon reduced price to flat $9.99 of e-books and due to this price increased to $14.99 on an average (Kugler, Reif, Kaschner & Brodbeck, 2018). Hence this agreement did not create true values for customers and attorneys on the behalf of Department of Justice negotiated with three publishers out of five to call back this price surcharge and hence communication skills worked as an important tool to get this execution done. In a vital example of negotiation, Apple and Samsung case always comes in spotlight, in the month of August at California jury ruled against Samsung because Apple convinced amazingly with their communication skills that Samsung is responsible for violating their patents rights and gained advantage in this negotiation as Samsung paid more than $1billion to Apple against this patent violation law as they copied design of Apple’s iphone and other products (Mircic?, 2014). Strategically Samsung made best use of the communication in this negotiation procedure as they were able to reduce this penalty to $600 million and then at $290 million in lieu of final settlement. In the case of the family of Marvin Gaye and Robin Thicke – Robin Thicke who is the singer and also a song writer who wrote the song “Blurred Lines” along with two writing partners and those two writing partners have filed suit against family of Marvin Gaye who died way back. They filed suit because Marvin Gaye did infringement of song “Blurred Lines” copyrights and they asked for damages that has been caused because of infringement copyrights. With the communication skills Marvin Gaye’s children filed a countersuit on them and also sued publishers who tried to spot a web net in this case and influenced them to drop case.(Chen & Tseng, 2016).
The Importance of Non-Verbal Communication in Negotiation
Last but not the least, this dispute has been occurred three years ago between Kraft Foods and Starbucks. The matter is all about distribution of Starbucks package of coffee in their stores. Kraft Foods aptly convinced arbitrator ruling and won case because of their strong negotiation skills and then Starbuck paid $2.75 billion to Kraft Foods for breaching code (Kugler, Reif, Kaschner & Brodbeck, 2018).
There is no doubt on the fact that essence of negotiation is entirely depending on the interpersonal communication skills. To gain advantage in negotiations, effective communications should be employed centered and strategically. To excel the skill of effective communication, it is very important to adapt the synchronization between verbal and non-verbal skills in order to achieve business goals in this dynamic corporate culture. (Oostinga, Giebels & Taylor, 2018. From listening to communicating both verbally and nonverbally, all the signals sent (and received) affect the outcome of negotiation efforts. Successful negotiation also requires accepting the other person’s views despite differences in values, beliefs, education, ethnicity, or perspective (Kugler, Reif, Kaschner & Brodbeck, 2018).
As a conclusion it would be correct to say that the communication skills of negotiator influence the negotiation process and outcome in an effective manner. If the communicator uses two-way communication than negotiation is easy (Ting?Toomey, 2015). In fact, most of the negotiation does not result in positive outcome due to lack of effective communication. Therefore, it is important that organizations and businesses should have negotiators who can communicate well. For effective negotiation, communication should be transparent in nature. It is important that negotiator should be able to express himself freely. The effective use of communication helps the parties involved in negotiation to understand the viewpoint of other people and resolves the conflict. Hence, the combined use of effective communication and negotiation is the basis of conflict management for organizations.
References
Berger, A. A. (2016). Interpersonal communication. In Messages (pp. 100-117). Routledge.
Bouwman, R. (2018). Public Sector Negotiations. In The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe (pp. 497-514). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Chen, I. S., & Tseng, F. T. (2016). The relevance of communication media in conflict contexts and their effectiveness: A negotiation experiment. Computers in Human Behavior, 59, 134-141.
Hatfield, R. C., & Mullis, C. (2015). Negotiations between auditors and their clients regarding adjustments to the financial statements. Business Horizons, 58(2), 203-208.
Kugler, K. G., Reif, J. A., Kaschner, T., & Brodbeck, F. C. (2018). Gender differences in the initiation of negotiations: A meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 144(2), 198.
Luthans, F., & Doh, J. P. (2018). International management: Culture, strategy, and behavior. McGraw-Hill.
Malik, T. H., & Yazar, O. H. (2016). The negotiator’s power as enabler and cultural distance as inhibitor in the international alliance formation. International Business Review, 25(5), 1043-1052.
Mircic?, N. (2014). Constructive communication in effective negotiation. Analysis and Metaphysics, 13, 64-72.
Oostinga, M. S., Giebels, E., & Taylor, P. J. (2018). ‘An error is feedback’: the experience of communication error management in crisis negotiations. Police Practice and Research, 19(1), 17-30.
Ting?Toomey, S. (2015). Identity negotiation theory. The international encyclopedia of interpersonal communication.
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