Use Of Negotiation Research Articles

On the Role and Regulation of Private Negotiations in Governance

Developments in corporate law continue to give shareholders greater levels of power over public companies. Instead of using their power to seek changes within firms through such traditional means as proxy contests and litigation, shareholders are increasingly relying on private negotiations with directors as a key component of their governance activities. Regulations enacted in response to the recent financial crisis will likely trigger even more widespread use of negotiations in the years to come. In this Article, I analyze the legal and policy implications generated by the use of private negotiations as a means of corporate governance. I make two related claims. First, I contend that negotiations provide shareholders and boards with several unique benefits that make them a more desirable method for resolving intra-firm differences than traditional means of corporate communication. In this sense, negotiations add value by filling a governance gap. Secondly, however, I argue that board-shareholder negotiations may never realize their full potential in governance due to current restrictions on corporate speech – namely, the SEC’s Regulation FD. The way in which Regulation FD impedes private negotiations stands at odds with many of the SEC’s own policy goals. To address this tension, additional regulatory intervention will be required for negotiations to continue to play a valuable role in governance.

Contingent Use of Negotiators’ Tactics in Construction Dispute Negotiation

In the course of negotiation, negotiators’ tactics should be responsive to the situational factors. This is commonly described as the contingent use of negotiators’ tactics. This study examines this concept in construction dispute negotiation and has three stages of work. Stage 1 develops taxonomies of the three construction dispute negotiation dimensions: dispute sources, negotiators’ tactics, and negotiation outcomes by exploratory factor analysis. A structural equation modeling is also used to confirm the taxonomies. Stage 2 examines the contingent use of negotiators’ tactics on outcomes respective to the dispute sources through the use of moderated multiple regression (MMR). Stage 3 discusses the findings. The dispute source, “Delay” is found to be a universal moderator in the MMR analysis of the tactic-outcome relationships. That means when the dispute source is delay, a wide range of negotiators’ tactics can be used, respective to outcome intended. It is also found that the most versatile tactics ar...

Practical approaches for engaging stakeholders: findings from the UK

Principles for managing stakeholders are discussed in the context of UK construction practice. The number of stakeholders in a modern construction project can be large, presenting numerous interfaces that have to be managed. Meanwhile, each organization has its own characteristic disposition. Therefore, the interactions between diverse organizations in a project pose a high potential for conflicting stakes. Against this background, stakeholder management assumes high priority. Qualitative research was used to investigate the practice of stakeholder management with 12 UK companies in the construction sector. Interviews were held with these companies and content analysis was used to identify themes that demonstrate effective stakeholder management practice. Construct validity and a workshop underpinned the verification of underlying and frontline approaches for managing stakeholders. The underlying approaches include maintaining existing relationships, providing top‐level support and being proactive while the frontline approaches include the use of negotiations, trade‐offs, incentives and concessions.

Responding to Streams of Land Use Disputes: A Systems Approach

Abstract Disputes over land use are inevitable. Two recent studies demonstrate that negotiation and mediation can effectively resolve such disputes on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis. Given this evidence, and the reality that disputes over land use in many communities are increasingly chronic and ongoing, it is time to move beyond the ad hoc use of negotiation and mediation and incorporate collaborative methods throughout the land use decision-making process.

Psychological Influence in Negotiation: An Introduction Long Overdue

This paper discusses the causes and consequences of the (surprisingly) limited extent to which social influence research has penetrated the field of negotiation, and then presents a framework for bridging the gap between these two literatures. The paper notes that one of the reasons for its limited impact on negotiation research is that extant research on social influence focuses almost exclusively on economic or structural levers of influence. With this in mind, the paper seeks to achieve five objectives: Define the domain of psychological influence as consisting of those tactics which do not require the influencer to change the economic or structural aspects of the bargaining situation in order to persuade the target; Review prior research on behavioral decision making to identify ideas that may be relevant to the domain of psychological influence; Provide a series of examples of how behavioral decision research can be leveraged to create psychological influence tactics for use in negotiation; Consider the other side of influence, i.e., how targets of influence might defend against the tactics herein considered; and Consider some of the ethical issues surrounding the use of psychological influence in negotiation.

Estrategias y metas en la resolución de conflictos cotidianos entre adolescentes, padres y madres

ResumenSe estudia la gestión de los conflictos familiares según el punto de vista del padre, de la madre y del adolescente en 295 familias biparentales. Se pretende comparar las estrategias y metas que se emplean durante su resolución y analizar el valor predictivo de las metas en la elección de las estrategias. Se seleccionaron seis estrategias y cuatro metas aplicadas a seis situaciones hipotéticas. Se observa un acercamiento activo y racional al conflicto, aunque las madres están más orientadas que los padres y los adolescentes a la negociación y hacer ver su postura, mientras que los adolescentes utilizan más las tácticas impositivas, de manejo de emociones negativas o bien ignoran el conflicto. La tríada presenta una gran coherencia en la estructura de metas y estrategias, más evidente en el padre que en la madre y el adolescente. Aparecen tendencias de edad que indican un declinar del control parental a los 16–17 años, no así del control de los adolescentes, mientras que disminuye a estas edades el uso de estrategias negociadoras por ambas partes.

Water, Adaptation, and Property Rights on the Snake and Klamath Rivers1

Abstract: Water demand in a viable economy tends to be dynamic: it changes over time in response to growth, drought, and social policy. Institutional capacity to re‐allocate water between users and uses under stress from multiple sources is a key concern. Climate change threatens to add to those stresses in snowmelt systems by changing the timing of runoff and possibly increasing the severity and duration of drought. This article examines Snake and Klamath River institutions for their ability to resolve conflict induced by demand growth, drought, and environmental constraints on water use. The study finds that private ownership of water rights has been a major positive factor in successful adaptation, by providing the basis for water marketing and by promoting the use of negotiation and markets rather than politics to resolve water conflict.

Negotiation in Academic Medicine: A Necessary Career Skill

Negotiation and its use in academic medicine have not been studied. Little is known about faculty experience with negotiation or its potential benefits for academe. Barriers to negotiation and how they can be addressed, especially for faculty without perceived skill in negotiation, are unknown. To better understand the problems that such faculty experience, we completed in-depth, individual telephone interviews of 20 academic medical faculty at 11 of the 24 medical schools in the National Faculty Survey, all of whom perceived difficulty in negotiation. Faculty were stratified by rank, gender, and degree. Semistructured interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed by five reviewers. We explored the role of negotiation in academe, barriers to negotiation, what faculty and institutions can do to improve the use of negotiation, and possible differences in negotiation by gender. Faculty were relatively unaware of the possible uses of negotiation to advance their work in academe. Women tended to see negotiation as less important to an academic career than did their male colleagues. The perceived hierarchy and secrecy of many academic medical centers was believed to create a difficult environment for negotiation. For effective negotiation to occur, faculty stated the need to prepare, gather information, especially on compensation and resources, and to know their priorities. Preparation was particularly important for women, correlating with greater comfort with the degree of aggressiveness in the negotiation and greater self-confidence after the negotiation. These informants suggested that institutions need to provide more transparent information on salary and promotion guidelines. Further, institutions need to empower faculty with a solid understanding of institutional policy, goals, and resource needs of academic life. Many medical faculty are insufficiently aware of, or skilled in, the negotiation process and find significant barriers to negotiate in academe. Medical centers need to improve the climate for negotiation in academic medicine to maximize the potential contributions of negotiation to the institution.

Children's cooperative and competitive interactions in limited resource situations: A literature review

The ability to balance cooperative and competitive behaviors has important implications for a child's overall development. While socially competent children appear to learn highly successful strategies for entering peer groups and negotiating access to limited resources, the development of this level of social competence can be challenging for preschool-aged children. Early childhood educators may therefore have to intervene to develop the child's social competence and promote the use of negotiation and effective conflict management strategies. Using theories of social exchange and human sociobiology, this paper reviews literature on cooperation and competition involving limited resources and highlights the implications of this research for early childhood education. Results suggest that a variety of individual and social-contextual factors might influence a child's development of socially competent behavior. The review highlights the importance of teaching children to negotiate effectively with peers.

Solving Ethically Difficult Care Situations in Nursing Homes

Patients in nursing homes sometimes give accounts of episodes in which they feel their autonomy and/or self-respect are violated as a result of the care they receive from nursing staff. In these ethically difficult care situations nurses use strategies such as negotiation, explanation and, in some cases, restraint. This study investigates how nurses apply these strategies to resolve ethical dilemmas in such a way that patients experience respect rather than violation. Critical issues that will be discussed include the definition of ethically difficult care situations in nursing homes and the identification of strategies for resolving such situations. Examples of the use of three strategies are presented. The use of negotiation, restraint and explanation are discussed in order to ensure respect for patients' autonomy and thus to optimize health care outcomes.

Culture and Negotiation in Militarized Interstate Disputes

The paper describes the research design and presents some preliminary findings from an extended investigation of the role played by cultural similarities and differences between participants in the evolution of militarized interstate disputes, particularly in the parties' uses of negotiation and negotiation outcomes. The authors employ three typologies of social culture, which are based on the works of Huntington, regional geographers, and the intercultural communication work of Hall and Hofstede, as well as indicators of shared democracy drawn from POLITY IV data. Negotiation descriptors have been generated from a random sample of 294 MIDs during the period between 1945 and 1992. The findings support the proposition that cultural similarities reduce the likelihood of MID involvement, increase the use of negotiation in MIDs, and improve the chances that negotiations will produce successful outcomes.

Budgeting: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Negotiation

Despite the common use of negotiations to set budgets in practice, accounting research has focused primarily on budgets set unilaterally by subordinates, while goal-setting research in management has focused primarily on budgets set unilaterally by superiors. In addition, budgeting research in accounting has focused almost exclusively on the planning aspects of budgets to the exclusion of their motivational aspects. This study complements prior research in two ways. First, the study examines how budgets and the economic consequences of the budget-setting process differ when budgets are set through a negotiation process vs. when set unilaterally. The study also considers factors associated with negotiation agreement and the relation between agreement and the economic consequences of negotiated budgets. Second, the economic consequences examined are budgetary slack and subordinate performance, allowing us to address the trade-offs between the planning and motivational aspects of budgets. Negotiated budgets differ from unilaterally set budgets in a manner consistent with social norms and/or information transfer occurring during negotiations. Both the budgets and the economic consequences of the budgetsetting process differ when budgets are set through a negotiation process where superiors have final authority in the event of a negotiation impasse vs. when set unilaterally by superiors. Further, negotiation agreement significantly affects the economic consequences of negotiated budgets. Budgets set through a negotiation process ending in agreement contain significantly less slack. A failed negotiation followed by superiors imposing a budget has a significant detrimental effect on subordinate performance.

Academic development through a negotiated curriculum

This paper examines the use of curriculum negotiation in programmes designed to prepare academics for their teaching role, arguing that this is an effective way to meet growing demands for professionalism in higher education teaching. A postgraduate certificate course which has been developed and evaluated by the authors for three years constitutes a case study through which the issues are examined. The course is based on nine basic principles derived from the literature on teaching and learning in academic contexts. These principles provide a framework for discussing the course and the responses of its participants. Implications of this case study for the wider use of negotiation as a way of developing the teaching professionalism of academics from a wide range of disciplinary contexts are then discussed.

Negotiation as a Means of Developing and Implementing Occupational Health and Safety Policy

In the health, safety, and environmental area, negotiated rulemaking, implementation, and compliance are proposed by their advocates as delivering two primary benefits: reduced rulemaking time and decreased litigation over a final agency rule. The experience to date, however, indicates that negotiated rulemaking cannot be relied upon to deliver either of these benefits. Nonetheless, experience indicates that negotiation can, in appropriate circumstances, facilitate a better understanding of issues, concerns, facts, and positions among adversaries, promote the sharing of relevant information, and provide an opportunity for creative problem-solving. This paper discusses the use of these three types of negotiation by the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Four negotiated rulemakings under the Occupational Safety and Health Act--each of which involved an attempt to establish an OSHA standard for worker exposure to a particular toxic substance--are evaluated according to whether negotiation was instrumental either in securing a more protective standard, or in securing an innovative technological response. The cases do not support the proposition that negotiation is more likely to protect worker health and stimulate more innovative protective technology than is traditional rulemaking. Rather, the record indicates that equal or better results could have been obtained through the traditional rulemaking process. In contrast to its willingness to use negotiation in standard-setting, OSHA has thus far shown little interest in making creative use of negotiation to promote technological change during the implementation or enforcement of standards.

The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2)

This article describes a revised Conflict Tactics Scales (the CTS2) to measure psychological and physical attacks on a partner in a marital, cohabiting, or dating relationship; and also use of negotiation. The CTS2 has (a) additional items to enhance content validity and reliability; (b) revised wording to increase clarity and specificity; (c) better differentiation between minor and severe levels of each scale; (d) new scales to measure sexual coercion and physical injury; and (e) a new format to simplify administration and reduce response sets. Reliability ranges from .79 to .95. There is preliminary evidence of construct validity.

PRIAM: polite rescheduler for intelligent automated manufacturing

This paper considers the problem of rescheduling in a decentralized manufacturing system. Flexible manufacturing systems must be able to respond to unexpected disruptions; including schedule disruptions. However, when a cell controller in a decentralized system responds to a disruption, it may disrupt some other cells, because the actions taken at one cell may have some consequence at another cells. In the approach we propose, a controller at a disrupted cell tries to respond in a way which is likely to be least disruptive to other cells, through negotiation with controllers at other cells. This approach, which we call replanning, has the advantage of retaining much of the original distributed plan, while avoiding wide propagation of the disruption through the rest of the system. We apply this concept to the domain of distributed factory rescheduling, and describe PRIAM (polite rescheduler for intelligent automated manufacturing), a polite rescheduling architecture which is currently under development. Simulation results show that the use of negotiation in polite rescheduling prevents the wide propagation of disruption from an initial local disruption.

Teaching and assessing problem solving for international conflict resolution.

Rationale and methodology for teaching a problem-solving approach to international conflict resolution in college courses and for assessing the outcomes of instruction are described in this article. The Conflict Resolution Strategies Checklist was developed to evaluate students' problem solving in essays about international conflict scenarios. Interrater reliability was adequate. Checklist scores correlated positively with Cornell Critical Thinking Test scores and were highest for students majoring in international relations. Students frequently considered use of negotiation and military force in their essays, but they infrequently considered third-party involvement, nonpunitive influence strategies, consequences of actions on future relationships, or ethical issues. In four studies, students exposed to instruction about a prescriptive problem-solving model used more problem-solving strategies for conflict resolution at posttesting than at pretesting. Instruction about international conflict issues alone ...

Age of onset of epilepsy: its effects on coping strategies

Abstract Research into the use of coping strategies to reduce emotional distress from negative life events has identified specific subscales within the more general concepts of problem-focused and emotionfocused coping. This study presents a preliminary assessment of the ultilization of coping strategies during stressful incidents among people with epilepsy, and the differences which may arise as a result of the age of onset of the disorder. Twenty early-onset and 20 late-onset patients were asked to complete a questionnaire using subscales from the «Ways of Coping» scale (Aldwin and Revenson 1987) and from the «COPE» scale (Carver et al 1989). Data were also obtained from two groups of 20 subjects without epilepsy, matched for age and sex with the patient groups (a total of 80 subjects included in the study). Results indicated that subjects with epilepsy attempted to minimize problems more than non-epileptic subjects. Adult onset of the disorder appeared to increase the use of negotiation, acceptance and...

NEGOTIATION AND MEDIATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR ‐ THE GERMAN EXPERIENCE

The article argues that one should look not only at attempts to reduce governmental regulation via privatization and deregulation, but also to pay attention to new modes of dispute‐resolution in highly complex and controversial issues. Following an alleged ‘crisis of regulatory policy’, the authors discuss ways and means of negotiation and mediation in the public sector. Based on American approaches, the German experience is at the forefront of their interest. The systematic and at the same time empirically oriented analysis looks at ‘alternative’ ways to regulate through cooperative behaviour, evaluates attempts at unassisted and assisted negotiations as a means of conflict resolution, and sheds light on the necessary framework for the use of mediation policies and techniques. A careful optimism on the use of negotiation and mediation in public sector disputes prevails.

Conflict types and strategies in violent marriages

This study examines conflict in violent versus nonviolent marriages, while controlling for level of marital distress. Seventy-eight married couples participated in a structured interview, an open-ended interview, and a series of six telephone interviews designed to gather behavioral self-report data. This study had three objectives. First, the association between conflict and violence was tested using two different measures of conflict. Results indicate that the relationship between conflict and violence appears to be mediated by the distress level of the marriage. Second, a typology of marital conflict was developed, based on spouses' behavioral self-report descriptions of their daily conflicts. Five types of conflict were identified through cluster analysis; there were significant differences between groups (nondistressed-nonviolent, nondistressed-violent, distressed-nonviolent and distressed-violent marriages) in the occurrence of “problem solving,” “squabbles,” and “stable heated arguments.” Third, conflict strategies used in a typical disagreement were assessed in the open-ended interview. Significant differences were found between groups of marriages in use of negotiation, initiation of the discussion, verbal attack, anger, withdrawal, apology, and no resolution. The volatility of the distressed-violent marriage, and differences between violent and nonviolent marriages are discussed.