In an article appearing in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review (December 2015), Alison Wood Brooks, a Harvard Business School associate professor, explores the role of emotions in business negotiations—and how to use emotions to your advantage.
“Bringing anger to a negotiation is like throwing a bomb into the process.”
Until about 20 years ago, there was very little scholarly research about the role emotions play in negotiation. Most scholars focused primarily on the “strategy and tactics of negotiating—particularly the ways in which parties can identify and consider alternatives, use leverage, and execute the choreography of offers and counteroffers,” says Alison Wood Brooks, an expert in negotiation research at the Harvard Business School. “Scientific understanding of negotiation also tended to hone in on the transactional nature of working out a deal: how to get the most money or profit from the process.”
Researchers have now begun examining how specific emotions—anger, sadness, disappointment, anxiety, envy, excitement and regret—can affect the behavior of negotiators.
According to Brooks, all people have some control over the extent to which they express feelings. Knowing you are privy to certain emotional responses to different situations can help you take steps to make that response less obvious to their negotiation opponent.
Understanding (and taking control of) anxiety and anger when negotiating
Anxiety
The role of anxiety in negotiations
Anxiety is a state of distress in reaction to threatening stimuli, particularly novel situations that have the potential for undesirable outcomes. Because patience and persistence are often desirable when negotiating, the urge to exit quickly is counterproductive. In other words, anxiety is bad when negotiating. Brooks notes that watching the TV show “Shark Tank” can provide insight into how the professional negotiators recognize, and pounce upon, the contestant entrepreneurs’ anxiety to gain the upper hand. “Those who seem the least rattled by the environmental stressors tend to negotiate the most carefully and deliberately—and often strike the best deals.”
How to take control of anxiety
- Try hard to avoid feeling anxious while negotiating
- Train, practice, rehearse and keep sharpening your negotiating skills
- Use “exposure therapy” like that used to overcome other phobias
- Repeatedly practice deal making in simulations and exercises
- Bring in a third-party negotiator (like authors, athletes and actors do)
Anger
The role of anger in negotiations
Like anxiety, anger is a negative emotion. But instead of being self-focused, it’s usually directed toward someone else. Most often, it leads to lose-lose results. According to Brooks, the research reveals that “angry negotiators may seek to harm or retaliate against their counterparts, even though a more cooperative approach might increase the value that both sides can claim from the negotiation.”
Ways anger can wreck negotiations
- Escalates conflict
- Biases perceptions
- Makes impasses more likely
- Reduces mutual gains (win-win)
- Decreases cooperation
- Intensifies competitive behavior
- Increases the rate at which offers are rejected
How to take control of anger
- Build rapport before, during, and after a negotiation
- Frame the negotiation cooperatively (seek a win-win solution)
- Consider reframing anger as sadness
- If the other party does become angry, apologize. (Even if you feel that his anger is unwarranted, recognize that you’re almost certainly better positioned tactically if you can reduce the hostility.)
“Perhaps the most effective way to deal with anger in negotiations is to recognize that many negotiations don’t unfold all at once but take place over multiple meetings. So if tensions are flaring, ask for a break, cool off, and regroup. This isn’t easy when you’re angry, because your fight-or-flight response urges you to escalate, not pull back. Resist that urge and give the anger time to dissipate. In heated negotiations, hitting the pause button can be the smartest play.”
For more about the role of emotions in negotiating, see: “Emotion and the Art of Negotiation.”
Photos: Think Stock
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