Negotiating Successful Agreements Even with Limited Influence
In the complex world of negotiation, having a strong Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) is crucial. However, when your BATNA is weak, two psychological strategies can help improve your negotiation outcomes.
- Subjective Power Displays (Dominance Behaviors)
Acting confidently and displaying dominance in the negotiation—even if your objective power is low—can increase your perceived power. This, in turn, makes counterparts less aggressive and helps you claim more value. Displaying dominance can subjectively raise your sense of power, correlating with better negotiation claims despite low actual alternatives.
Dominance behaviors include taking up more space, speaking loudly, expressing preferences clearly, being assertive, leading conversations, and expressing anger. However, it's important to note that these behaviors can backfire if counterparts perceive them as attempts to gain status.
- Imagining Strong BATNAs
Mentally simulating a strong alternative to the current negotiation—even if it’s not real—can boost your confidence and lead to more ambitious offers and better outcomes close to what a strong BATNA would achieve. Experiments show negotiators who imagine having strong options make higher first offers and secure better deals than those aware they have weak alternatives.
To increase the effectiveness of this strategy, it's recommended to vividly picture the alternative offer and its emotional impact. These psychological strategies tap into perception and mindset, which are critical when the objective leverage (actual alternatives) is limited.
The findings of a study by INSEAD researcher Michael Schaerer and colleagues suggest that positive beliefs, even if they're not rooted in reality, can make us more ambitious and successful in negotiation. In some cases, high-power negotiators' dominance behaviors helped them and their counterparts create new sources of value, as their counterparts relied on more collaborative moves to make a good deal.
However, it's important to note that when negotiators are very far apart on price, imagining a healthy BATNA can make you overly ambitious and bring about an impasse when a satisfactory deal was possible.
Additional approaches for weak BATNAs include carefully framing agreements (emphasising negotiable terms over rigid drafts), raising awareness of potential risks or costs to the other party, such as legal or reputational risks, to deter aggressive moves, and managing your emotions to avoid reactive decisions that weaken your position.
In conclusion, by employing subjective power displays and imagining strong BATNAs, negotiators can enhance their psychological leverage and negotiation silhouette, enabling them to secure better deals despite inherently weak fallback options. Thinking about the BATNA we'd like to have may inspire us to ask for more and get better results.
- In the absence of a strong Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA), visualizing strong alternatives (even if unreal) can boost one's confidence and lead to ambitious offers and better negotiation outcomes.
- The strategy of imagining strong BATNAS emphasizes the importance of a positive mindset and vividly picturing the alternative offer and its emotional impact to improve negotiation success.
- Research by INSEAD has shown that possessing positive beliefs, regardless of their reality, can make negotiators more ambitious and successful, leading to the creation of new sources of value.
- When negotiating with weak BATNAs, employing psychological strategies like subjective power displays and mental simulations of strong alternatives can enhance one's psychological leverage and negotiation outcomes, even without ideal fallback options.
