Up to this point, we have focused on negotiations that take place between two individuals. Although many of your negotiations take place between you and a single counterpart, even negotiations with only two sets of interests can have a side composed of an individual or of a team with multiple members. Negotiating as part of or across the table from a team is really not that unusual. For example, your family is meeting with the families of your siblings to select a residential facility for your aging parents. Or you are trying to get a permit to build a barn, and you need the approval of the zoning board, which consists of several members. Or you and your team are presenting a proposal for a new project to the executive team of your company or the management team of your newly formed start-up is meeting with partners of a venture capital firm to discuss their willingness to fund your new venture.
In some of these situations, you are negotiating as an individual facing a multiperson counterpart. And in others, there are team-on-team negotiations. Although these are still two-party negotiations (there are only two sides) having multiple individuals represent one side greatly increases the complexity of the negotiation.1
Specifically, it becomes necessary to coordinate the planning process, understand and integrate the preferences or interests among the members of your team, and develop and implement a cohesive negotiating strategy. Of course, the complexity increases when there more than two perspectives represented in the negotiation. If negotiating among two teams seems complicated, imagine the difficulty of three or more sides when you are negotiating with multiple individuals or teams, each with a different set of interests. For the sake of simplicity, we first consider the basics of team negotiating, and toward the end of the chapter we will describe some of the more complex scenarios you might face in multiteam negotiations.
THE CHALLENGE OF NEGOTIATING IN A TEAM
In contrast to the planning an individual should do in advance of a negotiation, a team faces additional hurdles such as whose voice is heard and how the individual interests will be considered. To negotiate successfully, the team must identify and integrate the preferences and priorities of its members in a process of intrateam negotiation. In addition, during the actual negotiation, team members must coordinate their behavior to maximize the team’s potential for value claiming. Finally, since teams are typically more competitive than individuals, they often have the unintended effect of making negotiations more adversarial—something that teammates must plan for before they reach the negotiating table.2
Team members may not be aware of the extent to which their interests and preferences differ, particularly since some team members may be reluctant to voice their conflicting preferences. Psychologically, team members generally believe that there is more similarity among themselves than with others who are not members of the team. If unverified, this assumption can lead to trouble. Although the criteria for membership may create similarity on some dimensions, such as organizational affiliation, team membership alone does not automatically lead to a common set of preferences and interests.
Failing to recognize and resolve internal disagreements and conflict among team members before the negotiation can have a number of damaging repercussions. Team members may develop reduced identification with the team, and because of their inability to resolve the internal conflict, members may be unable to reach an internal consensus on what they want to achieve or the strategies and tactics they want to implement in service of their goals in the upcoming negotiation. The challenge is for team members to fashion an agreement with their team counterparts who are on the same side of the dispute but may bring very different expectations about the issues, strategies, and outcomes that constitute an acceptable agreement.
In the preparation phase, it is important to understand just how aligned the team members are in terms of their preferences. It might be the case that all members have exactly the same preferences, priorities, and perspectives on their alternatives, reservation prices, and aspiration prices. If so, then there is likely to be little internal conflict among the team members—and the preparation process, with possibly the exception of the difficulty of scheduling meeting times, would, to a large extent, resemble the preparation of an individual.
But what if team members have very different—and perhaps conflicting—views of what a good deal should be? What if there were internal conflicts about what members expect to achieve in the negotiation—their aspirations, reservation prices, and their preferences and priorities? In this case, achieving internal agreement may be quite difficult. Although there has been little research in the negotiation domain that explicitly examines the challenges of intrateam negotiations, we can draw from team-based research to inform negotiators in teams of the challenges and opportunities that await them.3
On occasion, you may have the opportunity to pick a team for a negotiation. In most cases, it is more likely that you will be a member of an already existing team who has been assigned the task to negotiate. This distinction is important, because team members often naively assume that because they are on the same side of the table in a dispute their interests are aligned—regardless of how similar the team members are in terms of their social demographics (such as age, race, ethnicity, tenure within the organization, gender, and other such markers) or their backgrounds (such as education, expertise, experience, or status). Because they expect greater similarity of viewpoints and opinions among themselves and other group members,4 they may be less willing to voice disagreement when it, in fact, occurs. Research on groupthink demonstrates that homogeneity can decrease individuals’ sensitivity to disagreement—but not because there is no disagreement; rather, members may be voluntarily censoring their expression of their disagreements.5
When groups are homogenous or similar in dimensions important to the team, members are likely to believe that their views are more similar than those of diverse groups, even when the views of both groups are identical.6 More importantly, research shows that individuals in a team believe that they are more likely to agree with a member of their team even when the basis for the team membership is unrelated to the issue on which agreement is being sought.7
This selective perception of similarity leads to what researchers have labeled the delusion of homogeneity or the belief that team members are more similar in their beliefs, aspirations, and goals than an objective assessment indicates.8 A delusion of homogeneity is reflected in the team’s belief about its internal consensus. The resulting, but illusory, consensus leads to proposals that are inconsistent with the true preferences and priorities of some (or even all) of the team members. This mismatch may sometimes become evident only during the external negotiation.
The more visible or surface-level similarities (demographic category membership or professional background and expertise) there are among team members, the more members will expect consensus in their goals and preferences (deep-level dimensions). But surface-level similarity can conceal deep divides in what team members are trying to achieve and the outcomes they find desirable or acceptable. Individuals normally expect congruency between surface- and deep-level distinctions such that people who are similar are assumed to have the same preferences, and people who are different are assumed to have different preferences. When team members extrapolate from surface-level to deep-level similarity, they expect little conflict and more agreement. In contrast, the mere presence of surface-level difference increases perceptions of uncertainty, raises the expectation of conflict, and motivates a more elaborated and systematic search for unique or discriminating information.9
Because the surface-level differences between teammates can change how confident team members are in their predictions of others’ interests and preferences, researchers found that individuals who expected to interact with those who were different from them were more likely to engage in more systematic information processing in attempting to understand others’ perspectives.10 This expectation resulted in more elaborate and detailed plans of action. Indeed, those who expect to work with dissimilar others are more likely to seek out unique information, while those who face similar others are more likely to discuss information that they and their counterparts have in common.11 This additional elaboration of information and planning resulted in members’ coming to meetings better prepared and able to articulate their preferences and the bases for those preferences.
When a team’s internal conflicts are not resolved before the negotiation begins, members experience a difficult choice: whether to maximize their individual interests or subjugate their individual interests in the service of the team’s interests. Having this conflict remain unresolved and playing out at the same time as the interteam negotiation itself reduces the team’s ability to develop a shared identity and discourages information sharing within the team.12 Further, teams that experience this internal conflict are less able to carry out organized, collective action to implement the team’s strategy in the negotiation.13 Finally, teams whose members experience internal conflict are less satisfied with the outcomes of the negotiation and with their fellow team members. So, from the perspective of the team, it is clear that you want to ensure that your team’s interests are aligned as much as possible with the interests of the members. Allocating the time and effort necessary to prepare, plan, and implement a successful negotiation process is a critical precondition for effective team performance.
Individuals start favoring members of their team (and disfavoring non–team members) even if they were assigned to a team based on trivial or random differences.14 In one study, participants were shown a slide that contained a large number of dots, and they were asked individually to estimate the number of dots on the slide. The experimenter then randomly assigned individuals to teams of “high-dot estimators” and “low-dot estimators.” Even though the assignment was random, people quickly began identifying differences between the two groups. Just as soon as these boundaries were identified, there was a clear development of an us-versus-them divide—and the way in which members of one group behaved toward members of the other group changed.
Members of a group not only favor other members of their own group (in-group) but also punish members of other groups (out-group).15 Thus, the presence of in-group and out-group members increases the competitiveness of the overall interaction.16 This is called the discontinuity effect.17 So the first thing you can bet on is that when teams are present, the negotiation will be more competitive.
Part of a team’s tendency toward competitiveness may result from the presence of the other team. Unlike the members of your team who are likely to assume a similarity of goals, interests, and preferences, the negotiators across the table are the out-group. Your team is more likely to make the reverse assumption and to expect incompatibility among negotiators. The strength with which your team makes and persists in this assumption of interteam incompatibility makes the negotiation more adversarial (as opposed to solving a problem) and may be as damaging to effective negotiations as is your team’s expectation of intrateam homogeneity.
As the size of the team increases, so too do the likely number of issues, the perspectives on those issues, and the sheer amount of information the parties need to consider. Keeping track of the factual information, as well as the values, attitudes, and perceptions of each member of the team is a major challenge. Integrating this massive amount of information into an optimal solution can be a highly demanding task as the bargaining zone changes from two dimensions to three, four, five, or more.
Thus, negotiators facing team counterparts are often victims of information overload. Because of negotiators’ efforts to deal with this complicated information, they may become concerned about feeling regret over accepting an agreement that they might later judge to be suboptimal.18 The less that negotiators know about their counterparts and the landscape of potential deals, the more second guessing and doubt they may experience. This increased doubt can easily lead to more impasses in a negotiation.
THE ADVANTAGES OF TEAM NEGOTIATIONS
Although negotiating with teams creates a host of challenges, it’s also true that teams—particularly those that function well—are often better able than individuals to generate ideas and develop creative alternatives. Because members of a team can pool their information and identify and correct misguided assumptions and errors of judgment within the team, they may be more adept at fashioning proposals that create value than are individuals.19 The likelihood that teams can devise a creative solution to the problems facing both sets of negotiators is facilitated by attacking the problem with the different perspectives that the individual team members may generate.
Second, having multiple members can help a team allocate the necessary negotiating tasks more effectively. Think about the communication demands for a negotiator acting alone. She must be able to convey proposals, listen to the other’s proposals, evaluate the veracity of the information that is being presented by the other side, consider and choose what information to share and what information to withhold from the counterpart, figure out how to incorporate new information and adjust the current proposal, and know when to say yes. Having multiple members of the team available to take responsibility for these various tasks (e.g., parts of the information processing and communication demands) can make the team much more effective at gathering and processing information. Realizing this potential, however, requires additional planning that draws on the unique advantages of a team.
LEVERAGING TEAM NEGOTIATIONS
As with many aspects of negotiating, there is not one best way to negotiate with a team. Teams have the potential to increase value creation if they are able to overcome the challenges of coordination and the intensity of an us-versus-them mentality. To see negotiation as an opportunity for value creation and to have the ability to propose value-enhancing outcomes requires more than just a group of people getting together on one side or the other of the negotiating table. Rather, team members must engage in systematic assessment of their own and their counterparts’ preferences as well as develop strategies to maximize their ability to create and claim value by taking advantage of the increased cognitive resources that teams provide.
The challenges of team negotiating loom particularly large if team members are not particularly skilled negotiators or have little experience in working together. What is likely to happen is that the challenges of coordination will prove too much for team members to overcome and they will, in effect, trip over each other in their attempts to negotiate. In the case of inexperienced teams, they are likely to be perceived by their counterparts as less reliable, behave in ways that increase their counterparts’ distrust, and be perceived as more competitive and less cooperative as compared either to individual negotiators or experienced teams.20
Teams with negotiating expertise were viewed (both by their counterparts and by themselves) as more powerful and generated higher-quality solutions when compared to counterparts who were also trained but negotiating as individuals. So teams composed of trained negotiators were able to create more value, claim more of the value created, and do so while being perceived as cooperative and trustworthy.
Expert negotiators are better able to enlarge the pool of available resources and claim a greater portion of those resources, and expert teams have the same advantage compared to novice teams. When competing with expert individual negotiators, expert team negotiators were able to claim more of the available value. Of course, if one were to assess the team’s ability to claim value on a per member basis, then the synergy would not be so impressive. That is, an expert team of three does not do, on average, three times better than their expert individual counterpart.
Even considering a team’s increased value-claiming potential, each group still needs to coordinate their strategies and actions to achieve these superior results. Perhaps one of the major ways in which teams run into trouble, particularly in negotiation, is their lack of explicit coordination on the “who’s,” the “how’s,” and the “what’s” required for the implementation of their strategic plan once the negotiation starts. Although researchers over the last six decades have repeatedly emphasized the importance of intragroup preparation, very few negotiating teams plan and prepare ways in which to coordinate their actions.21 This failure is not simply the specific failure of negotiating teams. Teams, in general, are often superior in analyzing and dissecting tasks but often fail to consider how to coordinate the pieces of their solutions into an organized whole.22
To take advantage of the benefits of team negotiation, teams should engage in a three-step preparation process.23 In the first step, team members should convene well before the negotiation to discuss the substance of the negotiation. At a minimum, this discussion should include a brainstorming process to identify the issues to raise in the negotiation.
Team members should then assess the priorities of these issues and potential trades among these issues. At this point, it is critical for members to be heard on what issues they believe to be more—and less—important contributors to a high-quality agreement. Some members of the team should also be assigned to take the counterpart’s (team or individual) perspective—in effect, mirroring the planning process from a different perspective. What issues are they going to want discussed? How will the counterpart set priorities on these issues? Once the issues have been identified, these two subgroups should identify alternatives, set reservation prices, and set aspirations.
The final aspect of this first phase is to identify the team’s assumptions about their counterparts—what they want and how they will likely behave. Then the team should set up ways to test those assumptions—for example, by tapping into their social networks to verify their expectations with knowledgeable others—as well as gain clarity on the information that needs to be supplemented and verified.
The second phase is unique to team preparation. The team should assess the skills of its members and assign specific roles in the negotiation. Who is most technically fluent in the issues under consideration? What past negotiating experience do members have? Are there members who have well developed listening skills or acting ability? Is there someone who is skilled at facilitating and directing conversation?
Once their skills have been identified, members should be assigned specific roles. Much as in a theatrical play, team members should have their parts to play in the negotiation. Who will take on the role of team leader, chief negotiator, relationship analyst, time manager, data czar, or the bad cop to another member’s good cop?
The third phase requires that the team plan how the negotiation will unfold. From the decision to make or receive the first offer, members need to know how concessions will unfold, who will monitor the information being shared by the other side, how to unobtrusively call for a caucus when new or disparate information is revealed or intrateam disagreements arise. In addition, attention must be directed to maintaining the proposal as a package rather than devolving to an issue-by-issue negotiation process, all this while keeping accurate records of the progress made.
Even within the most motivated and expert teams, all members may not be able to reach complete agreement on a particular proposal because the team members may not agree about the rank ordering of the issues and the strategies to achieve their preferred outcomes. As a result, teams must establish a method of agreement, such as majority rule or consensus. Absent such a mechanism, individual members from one or both sides of a team negotiation may revert to another way to maximize their unique interests within the context of an intrateam negotiation: they may join a subgroup by forming a coalition that has the political power to move the larger team or set of disputants to accept a specific proposal or outcome.
Coalition Formation: Who’s In and Who’s Out?
A coalition is a subgroup composed of multiple parties who cooperate to obtain an outcome that satisfies the interests of the coalition members rather than those not in the coalition. Through the formation of a coalition, individual members of a team can create a dominant subgroup that can cooperate to obtain an outcome that satisfies the interests of its members rather than those of the larger group or team.24 Coalitions are possible whenever there are more than two negotiators, even if those individuals represent sides of the deal. That is, while coalitions may be formed within the boundary of a particular team, coalitions can also be formed by members of different teams who may be negotiating with each other. In either situation, members of the winning coalition are likely to get more of what they specifically want rather than what might be in the best interest of their teammates or the other side.
Coalitions typically begin with one founder who initiates the coalition by enlisting others with promises and commitments of resources. Initiating or joining a coalition early in its development involves some risk, because the initiators and early joiners are uncertain whether the coalition will garner enough critical mass to win. Because of the uncertainty, the founder typically has to offer a disproportionate share of the resources to induce early potential partners to join, at least until the coalition is well established.25
Note the interesting aspect here of coalitions—they are relationships that are built through the process of negotiating cooperative agreements among allies or disrupting the negotiating process of potential adversaries. Potential coalition partners are those who have compatible interests and who are open to relationships that foster trust and mutual obligation; what’s more, each of these potential coalition partners will be attracted to a particular coalition because membership offers benefits that cannot be realized in other coalitions or by individual action.
Coalitions gain power because of the resources that their members control. One reflection of that power is the exclusivity of the coalition. The more people are attracted to joining the coalition and the fewer opportunities for joining, the more powerful it and its members are.
Coalitions are not simply about exclusivity. They exist because they have the potential to achieve the goals of their members. They might block a more powerful counterpart, or control critical resources (votes, dollars, solutions) to achieve a common goal (as is often the case in parliamentary forms of government).26
An individual’s power within a coalition can be strategic, normative, or relational.27 Strategic power is the classic form of power that emerges from the availability of alternative coalition partners; those who are invited to join alternative coalitions are perceived as more powerful by their colleagues. Normative power is based on what parties consider just or fair mechanisms to allocate the resources the coalition can command. Normative power also can serve a strategic function because the party that proposes the principle of what constitutes a fair distribution often proposes an allocation norm that favors their particular interests. Finally, relationship-based power comes from the compatibility of preferences among coalition members. Parties who see each other as having compatible interests, values, or preferences are likely to maintain a relationship over time that can influence or block other possible coalitions.
In an empirical test, relationship power was most effective for negotiators seeking to be included in final deals and to claim more value, as it affected both the formation and stability of coalitions. Resistance from parties outside the coalition tended to strengthen the bond among the coalition members, making it more likely for them to continue to identify and cooperate with each other and to compete with the non–coalition members. Therefore, when coalitions initially formed because of relationship power, they were likely to be broadly effective, influencing even those issues for which the coalition members did not have compatible preferences. In essence, this sort of power lowered uncertainty about future exclusion.
Strategic Considerations That Enhance Effective Coalitions
Research on teams has demonstrated the importance of the “first advocacy effect,” which is vital to understand when confronting a team negotiation. A form of anchoring, this effect occurs when an early position is offered by a team member on a contentious issue. In hearing this early position statement, undecided team members are influenced in the direction of the position. Those who hold opposing positions, speaking later, must not only make their arguments but also neutralize the influence of this early advocate. This makes their task more difficult. In much the same way, motivated negotiators who see the benefit of a coalitional strategy are more likely to found a coalition the earlier they identify their potential partners and begin to secure their commitment. Once that initial tie is secured, then both members of this coalition can identify and enlist additional members until the necessary size or level of influence is achieved. The strategic lesson is to meet early and often with potential coalition partners, to identify valuable partners—and begin building a strong coalition—as soon as possible.
The most powerful member in a coalition is the marginal member of the winning coalition—that is, the person whose participation expands the coalition to a size that allows it to achieve its goals. Consider the power of the small political party, in coalition governments, that with its few seats, brings the not-quite-majority party to the necessary 50 percent to allow it to govern. In these political contexts, it is clear that this minority party can extract considerable resources for its alignment relative to the number of voters it might represent.
Securing coalition membership is not unique; it, too, is a negotiation. Consider the interests of potential members and what aspects of your coalition would make their alignment more attractive. Much like individual coalition members, after all, coalitions themselves have two forms of power: how attractive a coalition is to potential members and the coalition’s ability to block competing coalitions. What makes a coalition attractive is its ability to control resources. Thus, think about how attractive coalition membership is to weaker parties; if they are members, they can rely on the stronger coalition partners to fight their battles.
Strategically, members of a coalition would do well to consider how competing coalitions can be blocked or which members of competing coalitions are most subject to defection. Because coalitions are often seen as transitory, less powerful members may be attracted to coalitions that have a history and a future, or to coalitions where stability among members is valued. As you consider new members, focus as well on ways to divide and conquer competing coalitions.
To make your coalition more attractive to new members, take advantage of potential relationships and create the perception of a future. Coalitions are often viewed as transitory relationships that dissipate once the decision or allocation is made.28 This seems completely understandable if the basis for the coalition were simply issues. You resolve the dispute, allocate the resulting resources, and dissolve the coalition (and your obligations). However, if the coalition were formed not as the result of a transitory issue but as the result of a real or potential relationship and the commonality that these relationships imply, then the coalition might easily survive beyond the particular issue or when the challenge gets resolved.
SUMMARY
Negotiating in teams presents unique opportunities for value creation and value claiming—if for no other reason than that teams have more cognitive resources that can be directed towards these goals. To realize their team’s potential, however, negotiators must also be sensitive to some unusual challenges, primarily because of the way in which individuals view themselves in the context of teams.
• Being a member of a team increases the perception and salience of similarity among members. Although this similarity often includes similar goals, individual members may be more dissimilar in their preferences and their priorities than their common group membership might reflect.
• Emphasizing similarity that is expected within a team may result in teams misperceiving the actual preferences and priorities of their members as they plan and prepare for a negotiation. This delusion of homogeneity may result in team members having to choose between submerging their own interests in service of the team or to stay true to their interests and surface the intrateam disagreement in the negotiation. Such disagreement may take the form of disputes among team members, implementing behaviors that openly or unintentionally sabotage the team’s strategies, or aligning with counterparts in ways that diminish the ability of the team to achieve its goals.
• Team members are often motivated to agree with their team members in ways that do not extend to the interteam interactions. Having a team as a counterpart also often reinforces the adversarial notion of opposition in goals, values, priorities, and preferences. Rather than seeing a team counterpart as having interests that are both in opposition to and in concert with your interests, you are much more likely to see a team counterpart as a monolith with preferences that are in pure opposition to you.
• Having an exaggerated sense of commonality within your own team is as potentially destructive as expecting unfettered opposition. In both situations, proposals are not likely to reflect the parties’ interests, and behaviors are likely to be viewed through a lens that interprets actions in their most adversarial light.
• Negotiations can take place between two sides of a table (interteam), but can also occur on one side of the table (intrateam). The latter scenario presents the possibility of coalitions. Coalitions offer parties the opportunity to combine to create value for themselves—often at the expense of the excluded parties. As such, the attractiveness of a coalition is based on its ability to secure the commitment of a minimum number of individuals necessary to achieve influence as well as its ability to block the formation of competing coalitions.
• Although the coalition is the mechanism for value creating, the members of the coalition must compete with one another to claim that value. As such, the order of membership can be critical. The member who is the difference between a winning and a losing coalition—the marginal member—is often able to extract dramatically more value than her commitment would command if she were the founder or a subsequent member (but not the marginal member that guaranteed influence).
• Negotiating within and between teams creates both considerable challenges and opportunities for the value creating that can enhance the eventual value claiming, both by the team and by the team’s individual members. But beware! Failing to take into consideration the systematic challenges that negotiating in teams creates is a recipe for both individual and team-level value destruction.