organizational behavior

The following items are tagged organizational behavior:

Communication Breakdowns: When All We Can See is Red

Posted by & filed under Dealing with Difficult People.

Miscommunication often leads to impasse in negotiation. When we don’t understand what the other party wants, we can grow frustrated by their perceived lack of cooperation with our own wishes and give up prematurely on reaching agreement. Miscommunication also can be a problem when we are consulting advisers for help with an upcoming negotiation, whether … Read More

Learning from BATNA Examples in Negotiation

Posted by & filed under BATNA.

How should you decide whether to accept or reject your counterpart’s final offer in negotiation? In their influential book, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton advise comparing the deal to your BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If the offer is better than the best … Read Learning from BATNA Examples in Negotiation

Team Negotiation: Tackle Common Pitfalls

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

When a team negotiates on behalf of an organization, it can often achieve more than an individual would, thanks to team members’ cumulative knowledge and experience. Yet team negotiation can create new problems. Groupthink—the tendency to go along with the dominant point of view rather than challenging it—can promote overly simplistic decision making in teams … Read Team Negotiation: Tackle Common Pitfalls

How Your Communication Style Impacts Value Creation

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

In negotiation, we bring our unique personalities and styles to the table. A reserved, cautious person is likely to bargain differently than someone who is outgoing and proactive, for example. There is much we can do to improve our negotiation performance—such as preparing thoroughly and using proven persuasion strategies. But can we also improve our … Read More

Negotiation Research: When Many BATNAs Are Worse Than One

Posted by & filed under BATNA.

Negotiators are often taught that the more alternatives they have, the more fortunate they are. If it’s good to have one strong best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, then it’s better to have many BATNAs, right? Not necessarily, results from a study by Michael Schaerer of INSEAD and his colleagues show. In a series … Read More

Business Skills: Make Concessions Strategically in Negotiation

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Business negotiators generally understand that to get what they want from another party or parties, they will have to give something away. But what concessions should you offer in the deal-making process, and what form should they take? New research on concession making in negotiation offers tips to add to your repertoire of business skills. Finding … Read More

Dear Negotiation Coach: What Hostage Negotiations Can Teach Any Negotiator

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Business negotiations often fail; meanwhile, hostage negotiations have an incredibly high success rate—up to 94%. We spoke with former police psychologist and hostage negotiator George A. Kohlrieser, the Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD Business School in Switzerland and the author of Hostage at the Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, … Read More

How to Get a Great Deal When Trust is Low

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

Negotiators from Western cultures, such as the United States, tend to be trusting. They’re often open to sharing information with counterparts, and expect ideas to flow freely. But in many other cultures, negotiators tend to be less trusting and more cautious about sharing information about their interests. Of course, there are many ways to build trust … Read How to Get a Great Deal When Trust is Low

Skills Needed for Negotiation: BATNA Analysis

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Ask almost any real estate agent, and you’ll hear that homeowners often turn down decent offers in the hope of getting a better one that never materializes. Such miscalculations reflect the difficulty of assessing an uncertain BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. According to negotiation experts, the ability to accurately compare the deal on … Read Skills Needed for Negotiation: BATNA Analysis

Negotiation research you can use: Too guilty to compete?

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Training.

Our emotions—including anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust—influence our negotiation behavior in systematic ways, research shows. In a new study, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researcher Uriel Haran is the first to examine whether feeling guilty affects our competitive drive. Guilt is often triggered by behavior we’re ashamed of, and it doesn’t feel very good. On the plus … Read More

Negotiation research you can use: The pitfalls of put-downs: When “trash talk” backfires

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

“Rocket Man.” “Little Marco.” “Crooked Hillary.” “Sloppy Steve.” These are just a few of the mocking nicknames that President Donald Trump has given to his perceived rivals. Trump seems to have a penchant for trash talk—which psychologists define as boastful comments about oneself or insulting comments about an opponent delivered before or during a competition—but he’s … Read More

Announcing the 2017-2018 PON Graduate Research Fellows

Posted by & filed under Awards, Grants, and Fellowships, Daily, Graduate Research Fellowships, PON Graduate Research Fellowships.

The Program on Negotiation Graduate Research Fellowships are designed to encourage young scholars from the social sciences and professional disciplines to pursue theoretical, empirical, and/or applied research in negotiation and dispute resolution. Consistent with PON’s goal of fostering the development of the next generation of scholars, this program provides support for one year of dissertation … Read More

Negotiation Research: A Downside of Anger

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

We know that anger leads negotiators to make riskier choices and blame others when things go wrong. In a new study, researchers Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer find that anger also leads us to engage in greater deception in negotiation—even when it’s not our counterpart who angered us. In one of the study’s experiments, … Read Negotiation Research: A Downside of Anger

Program on Negotiation associate Paola Cecchi Dimeglio Edits a Collection of Dispute Resolution Essays in “Interdisciplinary Handbook of Dispute Resolution”

Posted by & filed under Dispute Resolution.

Program on Negotiation associate and researcher Paola Cecchi Dimeglio, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Research Project, was the editor for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary guide to dispute resolution that combines negotiation research written in both French and English. Cecchi Dimeglio’s “Interdisciplinary Handbook of Dispute Resolution,” published by Larcier, is currently available in the Program … Read More

Negotiation Research You Can Use: Two new studies look at how our emotions affected negotiated outcomes

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Feeling ambivalent in negotiation? No worries  Business negotiators often find themselves feeling positive and negative emotions simultaneously, such as concern that an offer won’t be received well and excitement over the offer’s potential. We often try to squelch our emotions for fear of appearing unstable or vulnerable. Indeed, past research has suggested that expressions of emotional ambivalence—the signs … Read More

Conflict Management: The Lasting Influence of Emotions

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

Psychologists have long known that an emotion triggered in one realm—anger over an argument at home, for example—can affect how we behave in a subsequent situation, including a negotiation. Such incidental, or unrelated, emotions might influence how fully we trust someone or how much we’re willing to pay for a product. Incidental emotions can even … Read More

Bet you didn’t know… New research on employee satisfaction, sadness, and selfless negotiators.

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Satisfied employees, satisfied customers? In a new study, Shu-Cheng Steve Chi of the National Taiwan University and his colleagues find that the degree to which salespeople enjoy their work has a significant impact on customer satisfaction with the outcome of sales negotiations. The study examined negotiations over the price of eyewear between salespeople and customers at the … Read More

Bet you didn’t know… Personnel matters in negotiation.

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

When outsiders become overachievers When faced with the task of assigning a subordinate to represent their organization in a negotiation, managers might look for strong negotiating experience, intelligence, a good attitude, and a winning personality. In a new study, professor Gerben A. Van Kleef of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues identify another beneficial quality … Read More

Former PON Graduate Research Fellow Featured in the “Boston Globe”

Posted by & filed under Awards, Grants, and Fellowships, Daily, Dispute Resolution, Graduate Research Fellowships, PON Graduate Research Fellowships.

Sreedhari Desai, a PON Graduate Research Fellow for the 2009-2010 academic year, was recently featured in an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe. Desai’s research examines the ways in which childhood cues can make businesses more charitable and individuals more honest. The full text of the article can be found here. About Sreedhari Desai: Sreedhari Desai is an … Read More

Summary of Mediation Pedagogy Conference Participant Survey Results

Posted by & filed under Daily, Mediation, Pedagogy at PON.

To better understand the teaching needs of the mediation community, Negotiation Pedagogy at the Program on Negotiation (NP@PON) organized a Mediation Pedagogy Conference in May of 2009. In advance of the conference, an 18-question online survey was sent to the 175 conference presenters and registered participants. The 75% response rate allowed us to illuminate important … Read More