As Adam and Eve joined hands to leave the Garden of Eden, he turned to her and said, "We are about to enter a time of transition."

A time of transition is the only way to describe what is happening in today's workplace, where technological "revolutions" seem to occur on a daily basis; competition is not only fierce but now on a "world market" basis; new dot.coms emerge every day; and the gender and cultural backgrounds of the workforce itself are more diverse than they have ever been before. Responses to these challenges have been dramatic: Organization structures are generally "flatter," and less hierarchical; cost-effectiveness is emphasized, but so too is customer satisfaction, quality, and continuous improvement. Work frequently occurs in cross-functional teams that exist on a project-to-project basis, then disband; in production and service delivery teams that are expected to apply knowledge, not just effort; and in increasingly diverse groups. The "psychological contract" between employees and organizations is also changing.

The Negotiation in the Workplace Project is a collaboration among scholars who are keenly aware of these changes in work organizations and who are working to develop, implement, and evaluate ways that negotiation theory and practice can contribute to understanding them and, in some instances, can even serve as a catalyst for change. It is our belief that a negotiated approach to change is a core competency -- not just a helpful skill -- as work becomes more knowledge-driven and as competitive pressures become more intense.

A "Mutual Gains" Approach to Bargaining

The roots of the Negotiation in the Workplace Project can be traced to a collaboration among faculty interested in studying the "mutual gains" approach to negotiation, both in the traditional union-management setting and elsewhere. In particular, faculty focused on the possibilities of joint training for labor and management negotiators in the mutual gains approach and on whether such training could have an effect on the collective bargaining process.

With early support from the US Department of Labor's Division of Labor-Management Relations, faculty from PON have studied new approaches to collective bargaining, developed new training materials, and published several articles in Negotiation Journal. These investigators are currently launching research to better understand the impact of the training and the staying power of the new approaches to negotiations.

Additional research on collective bargaining is being co-led by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and Thomas Kochan (also affiliated with the workplace negotiation initiative) as part of the National Performance Review Initiative by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. In 1999 they completed a second national random-sample survey of labor and management negotiators. Their findings are summarized in a publication of the Industrial Relations Research Association.

The Workplace, Gender, and Organizational Effectiveness

Co-Director Deborah M. Kolb is involved in a number of action-research projects in collaboration with the Center on Gender in Organizations at the Simmons College Graduate School of Management that link gender equity issues to organizational effectiveness. In this work, Kolb says, "we use a gender lens to analyze how work cultures and practice, which typically reflect masculine values and life situations, make it challenging for women (and many men as well) to succeed. But also, our analyses demonstrate that these very same cultures and practices can also undermine organization effectiveness." The group's work with organizations to change these work practices is detailed in the Harvard Business Review (January 2000).

Negotiation is basic to this enterprise as individuals use bargaining skills to push back on these cultural assumptions. Individuals caught in double binds around gender issues find that using negotiation skills opens up space for them to be more effective and to have their work recognized as such. Organizational change agents find that negotiation helps them deal with resistance to change over issues that are deeply rooted in gendered assumptions in the workplace. Currently Kolb and her colleagues are initiating a new project -- building alliances across differences. For more information, see the CGO website (www.simmons.edu/som/centers/cgo).

Gender Issues in Negotiation

The Negotiations in the Workplace Project has an abiding interest in gender issues in negotiation. Work on gender issues in negotiation has taken a new direction with the research conducted by Deborah Kolb and her colleagues on feminist theory and negotiations and gender relations in the workplace. In collaboration with Professor Linda Putnam, Kolb has cast a critical eye on basic assumptions and concepts to see what kinds of behaviors are prominent and which are silenced or left out entirely.

In their 2000 book, The Shadow Negotiation: How Women Can Master the Hidden Agendas that Determine Bargaining Success, Kolb and Judith Williams elaborate the concept of the shadow negotiation as the context in which gender issues play out. Contending that existing negotiation theory minimizes the social context in which negotiation occurs, the authors focus on how negotiators tacitly negotiate about how they will negotiate, even though they do not discuss these issues directly. In the shadow negotiation, gender comes into play at personal, expectational, and situational levels.

Global Diffusion of Workplace ADR Principles

Project Co-Director Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld is currently leading research supported through PON's faculty research fund on the global diffusion of new work systems and the role of "alternative" dispute resolution therein. He is one of the co-authors of Knowledge- Driven Work: Unexpected Lessons from Japanese and U.S. Work Practices (Oxford University Press, 1998) who have found that a negotiated diffusion strategy yields significant advantages over what are termed "piecemeal" and "unilateral" strategies. This research also builds on analysis of recent data from South Africa's Commission on Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), which resolved over 100,000 workplace disputes in its first two years of operation. in the Workplace.

Executive Education

Faculty affiliated with this research project have developed two short training programs that are part of the Program on Negotiation's executive education offerings, one designed for human resources professionals and the second for labor and management executives.

"Negotiating Labor Agreements" seminar co-chairs Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Robert B. McKersie, and Nancy Peace recently conducted a preliminary self-assessment study of past participants, assessing the effectiveness of the training in subsequent negotiations, and developed and posted the "beta" version of an interactive website for past seminar participants with the assistance of PON intern Olga Syska and PON Technology Coordinator Edward Hillis. At PON's March 2000 conference on Negotiation Pedagogy, McKersie and Cutcher-Gershenfeld presented some of the underlying logic and findings from the self-assessment study.

With Professor Lawrence Susskind, Kolb is currently developing a new program -- "Managing Conflict Inside Organizations."

Affiliated Faculty

Lotte Bailyn
Sloan School of Management
MIT

Anne Donnellon
Department of Management
Babson College

Susan Eaton
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Robin Ely
Harvard Business School

Joyce K. Fletcher
Center for Gender in Organizations
Simmons College Graduate School of Management

Thomas Kochan
Sloan School of Management
MIT

Elaine M. Landry
Babson College

Robina Marks
University of Capetown

Robert B. McKersie
Sloan School of Management MIT

Deborah Merrill-Sands
Center for Gender in Organizations
Simmons College Graduate School of Management

Debra Meyerson
Stanford University

Nancy Peace
Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution

Linda Putnam
Texas A & M University

Mary P. Rowe
Sloan School of Management
MIT

Maureen Scully
Center on Gender in Organizations
Simmons College Graduate School of Management

Bert A. Spector
Northeastern University

Lawrence E. Susskind
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
MIT

Kathleen Valley
Harvard Business School

Michael Watkins
Harvard Business School

Executive Education Teams

Human Resource Management

Deborah Kolb
Michael Watkins
Kathleen Valley
Bert Spector

Negotiating Labor Agreements

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld
Robert B. McKersie
Nancy Peace
Elaine M. Landry
Thomas Kochan
Phyliss Segal
Lawrence Susskind
Kathleen Valley