Negotiation Application

 

You will write a paper reflecting on, summarizing, and analyzing some portions of the readings and your experience as a negotiator. This is a self-assessment where you analyze yourself, including your style as a negotiator and its strengths and weaknesses, based on your experience in your work life and what you have learned in this course.

Reflect back on a “live” personal negotiation (either in your organization or in your personal life). The substance of the negotiation may be anything—a purchase, something related to a job or employment search, relations with peers, co-workers, or family members and the like.

This assignment has a maximum of six double-spaced typed pages (Times New Roman 12-point font, 1” margins throughout, the six-page limit is not inclusive of a cover page). In many ways, the Personal Negotiation write-up can be considered as a more elaborate version of the discussions we completed in class after our simulations or the reflection papers you wrote during the distance portion of the class. Your personal involvement should give you insights into the problem, however, that are often missing or artificially simulated in the exercises. There are several sections for the paper and your paper should follow this structure (use headings please):

• Problem description: Since the instructor does not know anything about the problem, a brief description of the situation and the nature of the parties and subject of negotiation are needed. This should be fairly brief (1/2 page or less).
• Preparation/Strategy: An explicit discussion of the preparation and strategy going into the negotiation should be included. Use language provided in the course materials.
• Process: Using negotiation theory and concepts, describe what happened during the negotiation.
• Agreement: This should probably come at the end of the section describing what happened in the negotiation.
• Retrospective conceptual analysis of what happened. This section should be strongly reliant on course concepts rather than common-sense analyses.
• Surprises/Special aspects
• Learning/Would you do the same or adopt a different process or strategy?

Students should think conceptually when writing (the readings and class discussions will provide assistance in this regard). Papers will be graded on the students’ ability to apply concepts taken from the readings, to produce clear explanations for the negotiation experience, and to think more broadly about how this experience might generalize to other situations.