"Your tone is
quite upsetting. You have been dragging your feet in
negotiation for days and now you finally respond to me
in the 11th hour with a ‘final’ offer. This type of
negotiating did not get you where you are today, or
did it? . . . For too long we have been bullied around by
your division . . . And now you want to dictate terms
to me. I am dismayed. So here is my final offer."
Tough words -- a far cry from the diplomatic querying and delicate
scolding that characterize most negotiations.
Why did this Kellogg
student use such an aggressive tone with an associate? Probably
because his mock negotiation was carried out wholly through e-mail.
"In face-to-face negotiations, there are more social cues that
keep us in line," explains Leigh Thompson, the J.L. and Helen
Kellogg Distinguished Professor of Organization Behavior. "With
e-mail, it’s not clear what the social norms are. We’re much
more likely to take risks."
Thompson introduced the electronic
exercise to her Negotiations class in 1996 in recognition of e-mail’s
growing use as a business communication tool. The first year,
Thompson’s class faced students from a different Kellogg section
over the electronic bargaining table. Their task: to negotiate an
agreement
with another division over property rights to a new technology.
In the
second year, Thompson added a twist:
She pitted her class against students
from Stanford’s School of Business. In
addition, she set up two scenarios. Half
the students received only the name of
their opponent, while the other half received
a photograph and were told to
make the initial e-mail contact a social
exchange.
From these exercises, Thompson
discovered that the personal touch can
be just as important in digital communication
as it is in "live" discussions.
Successful e-mail negotiators were
courteous, kept their messages short
and stayed in regular contact. They also
seemed to recognize the shortcomings of e-mail, such as delayed
response
time, and were able to work around
potential problems.
For instance, successful negotiators
communicated their intentions about
communicating-which Thompson
calls "metacommunication." They
might send the message, "I’m going
out of town, so you won’t hear from
me until Wednesday." Those who
didn’t explain their plans, on the other
hand, caused their recipients to develop
"sinister attributions" -- the recipients
wondered why they hadn’t gotten
a response and feared the worst.
Unsuccessful electronic negotiators
also tended to take unwise risks, such
as making a "final offer." "That’s a
huge threat," Thompson says, and
one that risks an impasse because if
the opponent rejects the offer, all possibility
of reaching a settlement may
be lost. Thompson speculates that the
increased number of "final offers" in
the e-mail negotiations may be because
"the asynchronous nature of the
exchange is frustrating and people
think that they can move toward closure"
by threatening to end talks. Another
reason, she says, is that "people
feel more bold and aggressive because
of the absence of social cues that are
present in a face-to-face encounter."
Still another factor that tended to
imperil electronic negotiating was the
tendency to "flame" -- to insult one’s
opponent. Thompson notes that such
rude behavior is "eight times more likely to happen in
e-mail than face-to-face," probably because people
tend to be more aggressive when they
don’t receive immediate clues that
they’ve overstepped their bounds. In
this negotiation, Thompson says,
"People who didn’t do well tended to
be paternalistic -- saying something
like, ‘I’m assuming you know nothing
about corporate finance.’"
In Thompson’s second experiment,
she found that those who maintained
a personal connection with their opponents,
exchanging photographs
and information about hobbies,
families, job plans and hometowns -- "
schmoozed," in Thompson’s words -- nearly always reached an
agreement. In contrast, almost 30
percent of the "strictly business" negotiations
ended in impasse. That’s
an enormous number, Thompson
says, for this type of negotiation scenario, where the two
parties work
for the same company and it’s in
everyone’s best interest to reach an
agreement.
Thompson hypothesizes that
"more trust develops when people
schmooze" -- even electronically.
"There’s a better mood, and it trickles
over into the negotiation."
It also can boost the morale and
productivity of a group in general, as
other Kellogg professors have noted.
Assistant Professor Mohanbir Sawhney,
for example, uses electronic
newsgroup-based discussions in his
classes. E-mail, he observes, has
opened new avenues of discussion
and participation. "We can discuss
current events and special interests
issues in far greater detail; the students who are active in
class are not
the same as the ones active in the
electronic discussions, which is nice;
and over the quarter, a ‘community’
is formed where people share insights
and help each other out," Sawhney
says.
Thompson’s next step will be to
comb through the e-mail transcripts
from the past two years, trying to find
more clues to successful e-mail negotiations.
She also plans to tweak the assignment
next year, setting students in
Kellogg’s Evanston-based Executive
Master’s Program against students in
its International Executive MBA program
in Koblenz, Germany. She’s hypothesizing
that cultural differences -- the
danger of "stepping on each other’s
toes" -- might be bridged through
e-mail. That is, if her students can
avoid cross-cultural flaming.
