Course Detail (Course Description By Faculty)

Negotiation is to attempt agreement between two or more parties on one or more issues. In this course, you will develop negotiation skill and experience, two essential components of getting both ahead and along as much as possible in business.

Skillful negotiators realize that achieving agreement is not just about competition (claiming value), but often also cooperation (creating value before claiming it). Moreover, skillful negotiators represent every party’s interests, issues, leverage, strategies/tactics, and biases, and respond with strategies/tactics that best materialize their interests while maintaining a good reputation and healthy relationship with every other party. You will improve your negotiation skill by research-based readings, lectures in class, a take-home exam, and reporting in writing a real-world negotiation that you will take part in.

Analytical negotiation skill is necessary but not sufficient for success at the bargaining table. Thanks to preparation and practice, experienced negotiators use adequate strategies/tactics intuitively – that is, they negotiate effectively in an efficient way. In most weeks, you will prepare in writing for the practice of negotiating a case with one or a few classmates. Then, you will compare and discuss your strategies/tactics and agreement or impasse with all other classmates. In one week, you will write an essay on some lessons learned from your negotiations so far. This practice and multi-source feedback will inspire your preparation and so continuously improve your negotiation experience and intuition, especially if you will experiment by systematically varying the strategies/tactics that you naturally tend to use.

In sum, your learning goal for this course is to develop towards an analytically and intuitively savvy negotiator who confidently achieves agreements that materialize their interests as much as reasonably possible under the circumstances of the current bargaining situation.

38001 (Managing in Organizations), 38002 (Managerial Decision Making), or 38003 (Power and Influence in Organizations)

The pre-requisite to take a behavioral science class prior to taking Strategies and Processes of Negotiation is soft (i.e., not required), but very highly recommended. Our experience is that exposure to some understanding of psychology as taught in our behavioral science classes (e.g., social influence, biases in cognitive or social judgment, etc.) before you take the negotiation class not only solidifies your understanding of the psychology you learned in the previous behavioral science class, but also greatly improves your understanding of how to negotiate. Although your behavioral science faculty tie the psychological concepts in these classes to managerial examples, it is nevertheless often difficult for students to recognize these principles in real world situations. The negotiation class helps you recognize these concepts in actual social interactions. Your ability to recognize these concepts “real-time” is facilitated by the abundant feedback provided by your instructor as well as your classmates. In addition, coming to class with an understanding of the concepts also provides a foundation that expedites the process of negotiating effectively. Although your instructors will cover the psychology that is essential for being an effective negotiator, our experience is that seeing the concepts a second time will not feel as a review, but rather will be viewed as a way to expedite the difficult process of internalizing these ideas and making them part of your negotiation repertoire.

Based on weekly preparation, class participation, one essay reflecting three in-class negotiations, one exam documenting negotiation skill learned in class, and one report of a real-life negotiation.

Students considering and/or enrolled should attend the first week of class.