Negotiation Chapter 7Finding and Using Negotiation Power

Chapter summary


We suggested that there were two major ways to think about power: “power over”, which suggests that power is fundamentally dominating and coercive in nature, and “power with”, suggesting that power is jointly shared with the other party to collectively develop joint goals and objectives. There is a great tendency to see and define power as the former, but as we have discussed in this chapter and our review of the basic negotiation strategies, “power with” is critical to successful integrative negotiation.

We reviewed five major sources of power:
1. Informational sources of power (information and expertise)
2. Personal sources of power (psychological orientation, cognitive orientation, motivational orientation, motivational orientation, moral orientation, and certain dispositions and skills).
3. Position –based sources of power (legitimate power and resource control).
4. Relationship –based power (goal interdependence and referent power).
5. Contextual sources of power availability of BATNA s, availability of agents, and the organizational or national culture in which the negotiation occurs).