Getting (More of) What You Want

You have completed your prenegotiation planning, made the decision about making the first offer, and are now ready to start the negotiation. But unless your situation is very unusual, there are still gaps in what you know. For example, your knowledge about many aspects of the negotiation and the issues and their values, particularly from your counterpart’s perspective, is likely to be incomplete. So you—like any sophisticated negotiator—should therefore regard the negotiation as an opportunity to extend and verify much of what you’ve learned in planning and preparing for the negotiation.

To take advantage of the information exchange during the negotiation, you should prepare a list of the things you still don’t know and a list of items you would like to confirm. While the optimal time to gather information is at the planning and preparing stage, some information simply cannot be obtained before the negotiation; furthermore, some information may be obtainable beforehand, but will be imprecise. Despite the necessary incompleteness of their preparations, however, few people treat the negotiation itself as a chance to update, confirm, or revise their knowledge particularly of their counterpart—and to enhance their assessment of the potential solutions.

But negotiators face a challenge: As you prepare for the negotiation, invariably you base your preparation on a series of assumptions—assumptions about your and your counterpart’s interests and issues and their value to each of you. In Chapter 1 you learned about the power of expectations to drive behavior. Your assumptions are the filter through which you evaluate information you uncover or receive. For example, negotiators who assume that their counterparts are cooperative are more likely to ask questions about their counterpart’s intention to cooperate; while negotiators who assume their counterparts are competitive ask questions about their counterpart’s intention to compete.1

But assumptions are just that—assumptions. You should test and, if necessary, update them, and the negotiation provides a real opportunity to do just that. However, this approach also creates a real danger fueled by your urge to reach agreement, which may encourage you to abuse or neglect the information you receive—for instance, by adjusting your reservation price simply to make it easier to conclude the deal.

The first step in taking advantage of the information available in the negotiation is to set the right tone—and the right expectations—for both you and your counterpart. The tone should focus on information exchange rather than on who gets what. We recommend that you use the first phase of the negotiation to identify what you and your counterpart are trying to achieve, including what the characteristics of a good deal from each party’s perspective would be and how you and your counterpart will know when you both have found that deal. Although this first phase will undoubtedly identify issues on which your and your counterpart’s interests differ (e.g., the buyer wants as low a price as possible and the seller wants as high a price as possible), it is important to highlight the common interests (e.g., a price that is acceptable to both the buyer and the seller, to establish an ongoing relationship, etc.). By identifying and emphasizing those common interests, you are framing the negotiation as a means to solve a problem that brought both you and your counterpart to the negotiation, you can create a more collaborative setting that counteracts the presumption of an adversarial relation and enhances information sharing in the negotiation.

This reframing to a more collaborative interaction minimizes the potential to interpret the negotiation as adversarial and to use a different filter by which you and your counterpart assess each other’s behavior. Consider how a fixed-pie perspective might influence your assessment of a proposal from your counterpart. If you assume that a negotiation is purely adversarial, then any offer proposed by your counterpart must be a bad one for you (and vice-versa). As a result, you will value a particular proposal less, simply because it has been offered by your counterpart. This effect is called reactive devaluation.2

An experiment demonstrated reactive devaluation: Participants (who were all U.S. residents) were randomly assigned to three groups, each being asked whether they would support a drastic bilateral nuclear arms reduction program. Participants in the first group were told that the proposal came from President Ronald Reagan; 90 percent of them said it would be favorable or even-handed to the interests of the United States. Participants in the second group were told the identical proposal came from a group of unspecified policy analysts; 80 percent of them thought it was favorable or even-handed to interests of the United States. Participants in the third group were told it came from Mikhail Gorbachev; only 44 percent thought that this very same proposal was favorable or neutral to the interests of the United States. While all three groups saw the same proposals, the only difference was who the participants thought crafted the proposal: the United States, a neutral party, or a cold-war enemy; and that information had a dramatic impact on how the participants viewed the proposal.

The second step in the opening phase of the negotiation is to identify the issues that are important to you and those that are important to your counterpart. Of course, this process requires reciprocity; that is, you will have to share what is important to you as well as finding out what is important to your counterpart. But be judicious: All information is not of equal strategic importance, and reciprocity is a two-way street. So share information, but require your counterpart to do the same. Start with coarse information such as identifying issues, before exchanging more granular (and hence more strategic) information such as the rank ordering of issues by their importance. We recommend that you do not share the most strategic information, such as the specific values of issues, or if this becomes necessary, reserve it for late in the process (if at all) when you are in the process of finalizing the negotiation.

Even when you attempt to supplement and verify what you have discovered about your counterpart’s preferences, your information search is likely to be biased by your expectations. As a result, your conclusions are likely to be consistent with your expectations, even if those expectations do not reflect the true nature of your counterparts’ preferences. But reactive devaluation is not the only informational filter that affects negotiators.

Often negotiators fail to take advantage of the information that can readily be inferred from how the negotiation unfolds, thus overlooking ways to assess the preferences and beliefs of their counterparts unobtrusively. In the remainder of the chapter, we discuss how to extract information from the way your counterpart concedes, the impact of the relational horizon (long-term vs. short-term), reputation, and bargaining history. Paying attention to these aspects of the negotiation can increase your effectiveness by supplementing and verifying the information you have collected in advance. In the next section, we consider additional sources of information, as well as filters that influence how you are likely to interpret the behaviors of your counterparts and how they are likely to interpret yours.

THE PATTERN OF CONCESSIONS

An important marker that you can use to assess the progress of the negotiation is the concessionary behavior of your counterparts. How much do they concede from one proposal to another? Are they making concessions early or late in the negotiation? How do your counterparts justify their concessions? These are all sources of information that can be gained as the negotiation unfolds. These three tell-tale behaviors can influence your assessments of your counterparts’ value of the issues or items under consideration as well as the counterparts’ satisfaction with you and with the outcome.3

Margaret was attentive to presence of these three “tells” when she was trying to buy a new horse. She talked to horse people who had a reputation for dealing honestly to see if they had any horses that would suit her—both in terms of her riding ability and the horse’s potential for working cattle. One of these people, a friend she had known for many years, told her he knew of a person with a really nice horse for sale. Margaret contacted that seller to assess the horse: She first observed the owner ride the horse, she then rode the horse herself, and finally she had the horse examined for soundness by a veterinarian. So now she was ready to discuss the sale. To illustrate the significance of the pattern and timing of concessions, let’s assume that the negotiation itself was simply about price. The seller was asking $11,000, and, based on the information she gathered, she countered with $9,000.

If you were Margaret, would there be any difference in your assessment of the value of the horse if the seller immediately accepted your offer (that is, made a unilateral concession of $2,000)? Would you evaluate the value of the horse differently if the seller gradually conceded on price over four rounds, eventually settling on Margaret’s asking price of $9,000? Or how would you evaluate the value of the horse if the seller took a hard line, making no concessions until Margaret was about to walk away—and then conceded to Margaret’s offer of $9,000?

Note that in each of the three scenarios, the asking price was $11,000 and the final price was $9,000. Thus, if one were to simply focus on the final outcome, there would be no economic differences among the three scenarios. So, from a purely rational perspective (i.e., Thomas’s perspective), Margaret should not care how she got to the price she wanted to pay. Yet, it is highly likely that Margaret (and even Thomas) would be much more satisfied with the purchase and her assessment of the value of the new horse in the second scenario of gradual concession more than the third with its hard line and, with the third scenario more than the first with its quick agreement.

In the first scenario, Margaret is likely to believe that the horse was worth less than she had originally believed, interpreting the seller’s concession as indicative that he knew the horse was not that valuable. Maybe there was something wrong with it that she had not identified? In the second scenario, she was likely to be more comfortable with her assessment of the value of the horse and more satisfied with the interaction and the seller, assessing the concession as indicative that the seller wanted to sell the horse (rather than that the horse was worth less). In the third scenario, she was more likely to believe that the horse was worth more but would also be less satisfied with the behavior of the seller. She may not want to negotiate with him again or recommend him to her horse-owning friends. (We return to this issue when we discuss the impact of the expectation of future interactions on negotiators’ behavior.)

The seller could further enhance Margaret’s satisfaction by justifying his concession to sell the horse for $9,000. For example he could disclose that completing this deal by week’s end was important to him because his son’s college tuition payment was due. Note that from Margaret’s perspective, that justification provides a credible justification that his concession had little to do with the horse and more to do with his financial situation. As a result, it is much more palatable than her attributing his rapid concession to the possibility that the horse was worth considerably less than she thought. This justification also reduces the likelihood of her experiencing buyer’s remorse: a buyer’s subjective and negative experience after completing a transaction that she may have paid too much and, having second thoughts about whether she should have made this purchase.

The value of a concession may also change depending on that the timing of the concession. Consider how willing you would be to give a $20,000 price concession in exchange for a more favorable closing date when selling your home. Research shows that sellers’ willingness to concede is greater when they have already surpassed their cost basis in the house and even greater once they surpassed the $500,000 tax exemption that the U.S. government provides (assuming you are married and filing jointly).4

Notice that there is no economic justification for the first benchmark: every dollar you concede costs you a dollar, irrespective whether you have surpassed your cost basis or not. The purchase price is sunk, and thus irrelevant from a rational perspective. This first benchmark is purely psychological. However, once you have surpassed your cost basis by $500,000, then every additional dollar you concede costs you about $.75 (assuming capital gains and state taxes total 25 percent)—a clear economic impact.

If the more favorable closing date were worth at least $15,000 to you (perhaps because you don’t have to move twice), then the $20,000 price concession might cost you much less and, depending on how much you value the earlier closing date, this package of concessions could increase the value you could claim in this negotiation. Of course, if your counterpart knows the cost basis in your house because he has already researched the price at which you bought it, he has insight into how expensive the trade-off is for you and can use this to make offers that are more favorable to him.

ASKING AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS

It is surprising how accommodating people are when asked direct questions. Most of us don’t think twice before we answer. In fact, most often don’t even think once. A great negotiator, on the other hand, is like a great diplomat: She can think twice before saying nothing.

If your counterparts are like most people, they are likely to answer a direct question, even if it may reveal information that is strategically detrimental to them. Moreover, you can enhance the likelihood that they will reveal useful information by asking a question and then simply waiting. Most people are surprisingly willing to fill up the silence.

Taking advantage of this human tendency is useful, but—to be successful—you need to consider how and when you ask your questions. Clearly they should focus on complementing and confirming what you already know, as well as finding out what you are missing. But even so, the type of questions you should ask, when you ask them, and the order in which you ask them all matter because of reciprocity and whether you can trust the answer you get.

As an example, let’s revisit the reservation price. It would be really advantageous if you knew your counterpart’s reservation price, but you’re not sure how to go about asking for it. In Chapter 2, we suggested that sharing your true reservation price is a bad strategy if your goal is to get more of what you want. But where does this leave you? After all, if you were to ask your counterpart to reveal her reservation price, you not only should expect her to misrepresent, but also to ask you to reveal yours.

There is a solution to this dilemma, however: developing skills in directing the conversation. Rather than asking your counterpart to reveal her reservation price, you could engage her in a conversation starting with what she is trying to achieve in the negotiation, moving to her alternatives, possibly even asking her what she paid for the item—information that would allow you to triangulate her reservation price.

The solution of directing the conversation works in other situations, as well. For instance, in the course of a negotiation it’s likely you’ll be asked direct questions that you just don’t want to answer. Explore potential answers that convey the level of information that you want to share but do not expose you to follow-up questions that you may not want to answer. For example, if your counterparts ask about your bottom line, consider asking them what is important for them to achieve in this negotiation—that is, what the characteristics of a good deal are for them. You are redirecting them from a “who-gets-what” question (the answer to which they are not likely to believe) to one aimed at information exchange, the heart of value creation—something we recommend you attempt at the beginning of the negotiation.

Of course, a major challenge in any negotiation is to assess the reliability of the information you obtain. As mentioned in Chapter 4, one strategy is to ask questions to which you know the answers, with a reasonable level of confidence, in addition to questions where you don’t know the answers. Your counterparts’ answers on the former can help you triangulate just how trustworthy your counterpart’s answers are on the latter.

Asking specific, targeted questions can help achieve more of what you want—but be judicious. Ask questions you believe your counterpart would be willing to answer. Before asking a question, however, ask yourself if you would be willing to answer that question if your counterpart asked it of you. In general, a series of small questions is more effective than fewer but bigger questions. But remember to pay attention to the answers both to enhance what you know about the negotiation and your counterpart and to assess the veracity of your counterpart’s responses.

But this is just the start. To fill in the knowledge gaps, one of the more effective strategies to enhance information exchange—and perhaps open doors you had not even considered—requires that you leverage the negotiation situation. Specifically, you can use specific aspects of your negotiation to interpret the information that you receive and even to predict the likely behavior of your counterparts. In the next section, we discuss when and how reputation, bargaining history, relationships, and your own ability to read and understand your counterpart’s point of view will help you get more of what you want in your negotiations.

THE POWER OF THE FUTURE

Is there a tomorrow in the present exchange? Is the negotiation part of a continuing interaction, or is it a one-time event? The expectations of continued interaction change the dynamics, both from an economic and a psychological perspective, so it’s important to assess whether there is a future when entering a negotiation.

When there is a future, reputation matters. Parties are more likely to take the long-term implications of their actions into account, influencing both their communications as well as their positions. The good news is that negotiators who expect future interaction are much more likely to communicate truthfully, act less competitively, feel more dependent on their counterparts, and be more motivated to develop a working relationship than negotiators who do not expect any future interactions.5 In addition, negotiators with high aspirations reach more integrative agreements when they expect future interactions as compared to those with high aspirations who expect the negotiation to be a one-time event.6

At the same time, a future may also complicate the negotiation. For example, negotiators may also be less likely to concede when a concession has a precedence value that negatively affects their long-term interests. For example, a long-term supplier may be less likely to concede on price because doing so may increase your expectations that she will also have to concede in the future. However, she may be much more willing to customize payment plans to meet her counterpart’s unique circumstances at a particular point.

The potential of future interaction also provides a different filter through which you and your counterparts interpret each other’s intentions, behaviors, and the choices that each of you make. That filter can be composed of each negotiator’s reputation and your unique histories. Even the type of relationship that you have or expect to have is an important input. For example, when either current or future negotiations are expected to be contentious, negotiators may be less willing to make concessions—particularly early ones—to establish a reputation of toughness.7

Reputation is perhaps the most obvious factor in a negotiation that contains the potential of future interaction. A person’s reputation is an aggregation of available information. It is shorthand for conveying information, both objective and stereotypical, and is useful at predicting that person’s actions. Experienced negotiators often consider a counterpart’s reputation when deciding whether to enter into a negotiation in the first place. For example, when Margaret was looking to buy a horse, she initially contacted people based on their reputations.

Your counterparts’ reputation, for example, can help you predict what actions they will take and, more importantly, influences your interpretation of their underlying intent.8 Through the filter of reputation, you attach meaning to your counterparts’ behaviors. If your counterparts identify an issue as important, they could either be exchanging this information to create value or strategically justifying a bigger concession on another issue in return for a concession on this issue. Thus, when your counterparts are known for their tough bargaining techniques, it is likely you would interpret their statement about the importance of an issue as a precursor to claiming more. Your response to this revelation would be very different if, in contrast, your counterparts were known for their value-creation orientation.

Reputation has been empirically shown to affect performance in negotiation. In one study, half the pairs, or dyads, were told that their counterparts were particularly adept at distributive bargaining.9 Negotiators in the other half of the dyads were not given any such information. In negotiating the outcome of a multiple-issue negotiation with integrative potential, negotiators facing a counterpart with a distributive reputation were less willing to share information and were more sensitive to attempts to control the interaction. Interestingly, those negotiators with no reputational information about their counterparts actually did significantly better. They were more effective in value creation when they had no information about their counterparts’ reputation than when they knew the reputation to be distributive.

In addition, negotiators with a distributive reputation achieved outcomes of significantly less value than negotiators with no reputational information. Their distributive reputations—and subsequent counterpart expectations—overwhelmed their capabilities as negotiators. This is particularly important because negotiators were randomly assigned to the distributive reputational condition: In reality, there were no differences between the experts’ skill at distributive negotiating. On learning of the distributive reputation of their counterparts, negotiators were influenced in what they expected and how they interpreted their counterparts’ behaviors, leading to a greater emphasis on distributive behaviors. Their counterparts reciprocated in kind, meeting these more aggressive, value-claiming actions with increased distributive responses, even though these negotiators were unaware of their own reputations. This type of reciprocity created a destructive conflict spiral that left both parties worse off.

There has to be the opportunity to interact in the future for reputations to matter, even if that opportunity were as short as the one-time negotiation above. This becomes clear when you think about negotiating with a counterpart who is local versus one who is transient. When negotiators interacted with transient counterparts (i.e., those with a high likelihood to be present only for a short time), they demonstrated shorter time horizons, and this focus on the “now” resulted in more adversarial interactions. In contrast, when negotiators interacted with local counterparts, they were more likely to accept short-term sacrifices to realize additional long-term advantages. This exchange required that negotiators be confident that their counterparts would reciprocate short-term sacrifices in a future negotiation—making the long-term gain possible and increasing the importance of the respective reputations of the negotiators. Thus, when appropriate, you can facilitate the negotiation by stressing the long-term aspect of your interactions.

Clearly, the reputations of your counterparts set your expectations even before you interact with them. Yet reputations are subject to change or modification. How does your experience in negotiating, especially your experience negotiating repeatedly with the same counterparts, influence your expectations about the interaction? That is, how influenced are reputations by bargaining history?

When there is a future, often there has been a past as well. What happened in your last interaction can significantly impact what happens in your next one. When negotiators reached an impasse in a prior negotiation, as compared to those who reached agreement, they were more likely to assess those outcomes as failures, were angrier about and frustrated with their performance, and intended to choose more competitive strategies in the future.10 What were the ultimate effects of these intentions? Did it matter if you were negotiating with the same counterpart in either situation—or someone completely different? The short answer, again, is yes. Your prior negotiation experience (impasse or agreement, in this case) affects your future negotiations, and this is true even when negotiators change counterparts.

When you change negotiation counterparts, your expectation of a cooperative or competitive interaction in the subsequent negotiation predicts the outcome of the present one.11 When negotiating with the same counterpart, your expectations have no effect although prior negotiating history does. If you reached an impasse in the prior negotiation, you are significantly more likely to reach impasse in the next one. Likewise, if you have reached agreement in a prior negotiation, you are more likely to reach agreement in the subsequent one. This finding suggests that the outcome of your last interaction may be an important consideration when deciding to keep or change negotiators.

It is within the context of relationships that negotiators have a future that is influenced both by bargaining history and reputation. Are relationships simply the sum of reputation and history—or is there more?

Bargaining histories require repeated negotiations, so it’s inevitable that negotiators build relationships with one another—but relationships aren’t based purely on the negotiator’s behavior in the current negotiation. Rather, relationships incorporate both bargaining histories and future expectations. Just like reputation, relationships add a temporal dimension to the effectiveness of negotiation strategies and tactics, and hence the value that can be created and claimed. In addition, when relationships are stable, negotiators are not limited to the present set of issues or values. Preferences for outcomes today and in the future can be combined and leveraged. Thus, from an economics perspective, relationships offer the opportunity to extend the value horizon to include value today and value in the future. But remember, the effect of relationships is a two-way-street, providing you with both advantages and disadvantages.

To illustrate the impact of relationships on your negotiations, compare the issues that you would face when buying or selling a used car when your counterpart is either a relative with whom you socialize and regularly exchange holiday gifts or a stranger with whom you do not expect to interact in the future.

The costs and benefits are quite different depending on whether your counterpart is a relative with whom you share a relationship or a stranger with whom you do not. It’s probably obvious that it’s better to buy a used car from a relative than from a stranger. When buying a used car, you will ask the seller questions that help you assess the quality of the car, including information about the service history and its current condition. When answering, your relative will have to consider the impact of any misrepresentations on your future relationship, something that the stranger—even an honest one—will be less compelled to do. As a result, the representations made by your relative are more credible, and you are better off buying from the relative than from a stranger.

In contrast, consider that you are selling your used car. You must reasonably expect that the buyer will inquire about the quality of the car, and you know you will have to be more forthcoming with your relative than with a stranger. In fact, even when you believe that there is nothing wrong with the car, a future, unforeseen problem could have adverse consequences for your relationship with your relative; but with a stranger the situation is different, since you do not expect to have any long-term relation with him.12

Paradoxically, this means that you want to buy from a relative rather than a stranger but always prefer to sell to a stranger rather than to a relative. But, given this principle, after all, why would your relative choose you as the prospective buyer for her car?13

As a further example, consider the earlier example of Margaret buying a horse. Because horse sellers as a group have a reputation for dishonesty (even more than used car dealers), Margaret looked first to her friend for a recommendation. Although she might never purchase another horse from the seller, Margaret is very likely to have continued interactions with her friend. Because of this ongoing relationship, Margaret had more confidence in the reliability of this seller because her friend made the recommendation. In addition, she made sure that the prospective seller knew of her ongoing relation with her friend, thus leveraging the relation between the friend who recommended the seller and the seller to get more honest answers.

Relationships are much more diverse than just the distinction between relative and stranger. The type of relationship between you and your counterpart influences the choices that you perceive as options, the type of information that you will disclose, and the interaction itself. For example, spouses exchange information that often reveals facts and information, as well as feelings, while strangers typically reveal only facts and information.14 Negotiators who have a bargaining history with their counterparts are more knowledgeable about what arguments will be most convincing, their counterparts’ preferences, alternatives, and favored negotiating strategies. Yet, these same relationships may, in some situations, limit your ability to pursue value claiming, particularly if that value is denominated in dollars or wealth because you may favor relationship over wealth maximization in choosing your strategies.

Consider the negotiation behaviors and relative emphasis on the relationship of individuals who are strangers, acquaintances (e.g., friends or colleagues), or in long-term relationships (e.g., married couples). In a research study, acquaintances achieved solutions with higher joint benefits than those achieved by strangers or married couples when faced with the demand of a negotiation with integrative potential.15 These findings suggest that there may be an inverted U-shaped relationship between the strength of the relational tie between the negotiating partners and the level of joint gain achieved in the negotiation.

As these results make clear, friends or colleagues and married partners have an advantage over strangers in negotiations because they possess information about the other party’s preferences. However, married partners may be so concerned about the possible damage to the relationship, that they avoid potential conflicts rather than confront them. When comparing friends and colleagues with strangers in negotiation, on the other hand, these more casual relations proved much better at negotiating. Friends and colleagues had higher aspirations for their own outcomes than did the married couples and made more concessions than negotiators who were strangers. As a result, friends and colleagues, especially those with high aspirations for the deal, were better than either strangers or married couples at sharing the information necessary to create value. Finally, because of these offsetting differences, married partners were no more likely than strangers to reach agreements of high joint gain by logrolling or finding congruent issues.16

It would be easy to infer from the last few of paragraphs that no reasonable negotiator should favor relationships over the potential economic value of the well-negotiated exchange. From our perspective, however, reducing the complexity of negotiated interactions to such an either-or decision is short sighted and unnecessary. Our goal here is simply to emphasize that the quality of the relationship may be a metric by which you evaluate how well you have done in the negotiation. Having a relationship with your counterpart can systematically influence your aspirations, expectations, the type of information you seek, and the choices you make in service of that relationship.

A great example of the dominance of relationship over wealth is the choice made by the young couple in O. Henry’s classic tale “The Gift of the Magi.” A young couple facing a bleak Christmas decide, independently, to sell the only thing of value that each has to buy a special gift for the other. The wife cuts and sells her hair, her most valuable possession, to purchase a gold chain for the heirloom pocket watch that is her husband’s most prized possession; the husband sells his pocket watch to buy a set of combs and mirrors for his wife.

The denouement of the story is that each gift is made useless by the sacrifice of the other—so objectively value was destroyed. Or was it? When discovered, the gifts with no economic value to the recipient and the sacrifice made by the counterpart were transformed into symbols of great value by conveying the importance of the relationship to each party.

Although you may never experience a sacrifice in your negotiations on the level of “The Gift of the Magi,” think about the value of a carefully selected gift versus a check for an equal amount of money from a dear friend. From an economic perspective, the check is a better option because it allows you more choices—you can spend the money on anything you want. Yet, the choosing of a gift requires more effort by the giver, and as such, can add another type of value to the exchange.

In negotiation, those who focus on relationships typically reach agreements of less economic gain, set lower reservation prices, and make more concessions.17 But lower economic value does not guarantee greater relational value. Relational outcomes have more to do with perceptions of respect and fairness, and the perceptions of “face,” than with instrumental outcomes. Just as in the earlier discussion of concession behavior, here we aim to show the way your counterpart interprets your behavior can have more impact than the instrumental results. In general, positive relationships among parties are not the result of instrumental concessions but result from a satisfying social interaction.18

The notion of face is borrowed from the Chinese notion of mienzi or the positive social value you claim for yourself based, in large measure, on the way others treat you in the interactions.19 Thus, a successful interaction needs to reflect consistency between how you are treated and the status you have claimed. (Note that you do not need to have the instrumental outcomes of the negotiation reflect your status; rather, it is how you are treated that reflects your status.)

How you are treated in a negotiation seems to affect your assessment of how well you did. A recent study investigated the impact of the assessment of subjective value (i.e., the feelings about the instrumental value of the deal, the self in the deal, the negotiation process, and the relationship between the parties) that employees experienced during their job negotiations. The subjective value of their outcomes predicted their compensation satisfaction, job satisfaction, and turnover intention after their first year on the job. As a point of interest, the actual compensation that resulted from the negotiation had no impact on any of the job attitudes measured, including turnover intention.20 This disconnect between subjective value and actual value suggests that you can, by your behaviors, maximize the subjective value of the deal for your counterparts without necessarily sacrificing your objective value (and vice versa). Careful attention to the relationship that exists between you and your counterpart need not come at the cost of your individual wealth.

The type of relationships you have with your negotiating counterparts can be instructive as to the ways they expect to be treated. In addition, relationships can give you an informational edge (because of your knowledge of your counterparts) in your negotiations as well as creating additional barriers to getting more of what you want because you may privilege the relationship over the quality of the agreement.

Besides limiting your negotiating counterparts to friends or relatives, is there another way to improve how you gather, verify, and supplement the information necessary for successfully negotiated outcomes? One skill that may substitute for the informational advantages and burdens that relationships provide is your ability to consider the perspective of your counterpart. As it turns out, there are advantages to being able to put yourself in the cognitive and emotional shoes of your counterparts—but there are also costs.

The ability to consider the perspective of your counterparts allows you to anticipate their behaviors and reactions.21 Although some are able to take their counterparts’ perspective more easily than others, it is always a skill worth developing. The challenge is to understand and leverage your counterpart’s perspective without becoming seduced by that perspective to your ultimate disadvantage.

While early research on perspective taking found that those high in this dimension were more empathic and better able to understand their counterparts’ interests,22 higher perspective takers were found to claim more value in the negotiation.23 When asked how much of a scarce resource they should receive, those who had taken the perspective of their counterparts reported that they were entitled to significantly less of this resource as compared to those who were not asked to take their counterparts’ perspective. However, those who had taken the perspective of their counterparts actually took 25 percent more than those who had not considered it. But the benefits of taking your counterpart’s perspective don’t stop at the amount of value you claim. Those who can take their counterparts’ perspective are effective at identifying creative solutions, coordinating social goals, creating social bonds, and countering the anchoring effects of the opponent’s first offer.24

People who are naturally inclined to adopt another’s perspective are also more likely to gain strategic advantage from this inclination. But what should you do if you are not naturally inclined to take the perspective of your counterpart? You can enhance your perspective-taking capability by actively considering the interests, goals, and preferences of your counterparts:25 exactly the information you need to complete the planning matrix that we described in Chapter 5.

The equivalent of a shared perspective-taking exercise is the prenegotiation discussion about what is important and how you and your counterpart will know a good deal. By engaging in this sort of dialogue, you increase your active perspective taking by trying to understand your counterparts’ interests and purposes for engaging in this negotiation. When you do this, you improve your potential to get more of what you—and, interestingly, your counterpart—want in the interaction.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we have explored strategies in using the negotiation itself to verify and supplement the information search that is necessary to identify opportunities for you to get more of what you want.

• Before you begin negotiating, consider scheduling a prenegotiation session with your counterpart to set the tone for the negotiation. In this session, focus on understanding the characteristics of a good deal for both of you, including what aspects of the negotiation are of particular importance to each of you.

• Carefully attend to the way in which you and your counterpart make concessions, both the timing and the amount, as concessions provide cues to how each of you value of the issues.

• There are other filters that can enhance your ability to predict and interpret your counterpart’s behavior. As you prepare for your negotiation, consider

° Your counterparts’ reputation, including their bargaining history

° The potential for future interaction

° If there were a future, the type of relationship that is likely to exist

• Take the perspective of your counterparts in considering how they will respond to your strategies. Doing so not only increases your ability to create value but also increases your ability to claim that value.

• Use a prenegotiation conversation as an opportunity to set the tone of the negotiation and exchange information about what is important and to assess your perspective-taking ability to understand your counterpart and as a way to mitigate cynical attributions that you and they might make.