NCJ Number
93807
Journal
American Behavioral Scientist Volume: 27 Issue: 2 Dated: (November/December 1983) Pages: 229-253
Date Published
1983
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This article offers an alternative negotiation model that takes into account conflicting goals and interests within bargaining teams and their effect on the larger negotiating process, including the role of the mediator. The model is applicable regardless of which issues, parties, or sectors are involved.
Abstract
Within each negotiating team are different types of participants. Stabilizers tend to want to settle at any cost. Nonstabilizers not only disagree with all proposals from the other side, but also dislike most proposals on their own side. Quasi-mediators often act as mediators between these first two types, and are instrumental in the core model's approach. Both the quasi-mediator and the mediator use the creation and maintenance of doubt to move other negotiators closer to settlement. The mediator wins the trust of the negotiators by demonstrating true neutrality. The negotiator must then move this trust from himself to the negotiating process itself. He must then engineer a further transfer of the trust, to the parties themselves. Effective mediators create and maintain doubts by raising questions about alternatives and implications that the negotiators may not have considered or fully appreciated. If a team is composed entirely of nonstabilizers, the mediator has several options: use time as a quasi-mediator as resources, funds, and public opinion exhaust the negotiating team; raise doubts; or continue along if both sides opt to stall. Alleged distinctions between the practice of negotiation in the public and private sectors are far less significant than advertised; what small differences exist are simply of degree. What is striking is not the differences but rather the similarities.