Advancing a distributive-bargaining and integrative-negotiation integral system: A values-based negotiation model (VBM)

Abstract

The proposed values-based negotiation model (VBM) agrees with and extends principled negotiation's recognition of personal values and emotions as important negotiation elements. First, building upon Martin Buber's existentialist treatment of religion and secularism, VBM centers on religion as one of many possible sources of personal values that informs respectful and mutually beneficial interactions without needing one to necessarily be religious. Just as one need not be a Buddhist or a Hindu to practice yoga, negotiators of any theological outlook can profit from a model grounded in broad, common tenets drawn from a range of organized religions. Second, VBM distinguishes feelings from emotions because the long-lasting and intrinsically stimulated effects of feelings have greater implications on the perception of negotiated outcomes. VBM negotiators view negotiations as a constitutive prosocial process whereby parties consider the outcome important enough to invest time and energy. Negotiators who use VBM appeal to the goodness of their counterparts by doing good first so that both parties avoid a win-lose outcome. This counterintuitive move contradicts the self-centered but understandably normal human behavior of prioritizing one's own interests before others' interests. However, when one appeals to the goodness of one's Buberian Thou counterparts, he or she stimulates positive emotions that promote understanding. Third, VBM provides a framework that draws upon an individual's personal values (religious or otherwise) and reconfigures the distributive-bargaining-and-integrative-negotiation distinction so that negotiators can freely apply distributive tactics to claim maximum intangible and tangible outcomes without compromising on their personal values or valuable relationships.