Ethics in the Negotiation

Ethics in the Negotiation

Negotiation is a pervasive features of business life. Success in business typically requires successful negotiations. In a competitive and morally imperfect world, business people are often faced with serious ethical challenges. Herboting suspicious abut the ethics of others, many feel justified in engaging in less-than-ideal conduct to protect their own interests. The most sophisticated moral arguments are unlikely to counteract this behaviour. We believe that this morally defensive behaviour responsible, in large part, for much undesirable deception in negotiation. Drawing on recent work in the literature of negotiations, we present some practical guidance on how negotiators might build trust, establish common interests, and secure credibility for their statements thereby promoting honesty.

“We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy” George Bernard SHAW

What do we mean by ethics?

Ethics are broadly applied social standards for what is right and wrong in a particular situation, or a process for setting those standards. And ethics grow out of a particular philosophies which; define the nature of the world in which we live and prescribe rules for living together.

Why do people choose unethical behaviour?

The first answer that normally occurs to us is that people are corrupt, degenerate, or immoral. In fact these answers are to simplistics; moreover, they do not help us understand and control our own behaviour, or successfully influence and predict the behaviour of others in a bargaining environment.

Here were three primary factors motivational factors which lead negotiators to consider using unethical tactics: the pursuit of profit, the desire to beat an opponent in a competitive environment, and the need to insure or restore some standard of justice that has been violated.

Three major categories of ethical conduct were used to describe the broad range of questionable negotiating strategies and tactics: means/ends, truth-telling, and relativism.

The more e is committed to abide by certain rules and procedures, the more one believes that following the rules will eventually lead to the desired ends. The second group of tactics, relativistic vs. absolute, forces us to deal with questions of whether there are truly absolute rules and principles of right and wrong, or whether questions of ethics must be answered by each individual in his own personalized, subjective view of the world. Many authors have suggested that bluffing, misrepresentation or factual distortion is sometimes necessary in order to effectively negotiate; such behaviour, however, may well be seen by others as unethical and inappropriate.

We believe that the negotiation process raises a host of ethical issues, more so than most other interpersonal transactions. Much of what has been written on negotiating behaviour has been strongly normative about ethics, and prescribed “dos and don’ts”. We do not believe that this approach facilitates the understanding of how negotiators actually decide to act unethically. We believe this process can best be understood by a simple decision-making model.

We proposed that a negotiator who chooses to use an unethical tactic usually decides to do so in order to increase his negotiating power. Power is gained by manipulating the perceived base of accurate information (lying), getting better information about n opponent’s plan, or undermining an opponent’s ability to achieve his objectives. Using these tactics leads to two kinds of consequences; first, actual attainment or non-attainment of these goals he was seeking; and second, evaluation and criticism of the tactics by the negotiator himself, by his opponent and by observers. Negotiators usually feel compelled to justify their actions –i.e., they know they have done something “wrong” and need to establish a “good reason”

We suggested that the decision to use ethical or unethical tactics may be influenced in varying degrees by differences in individual backgrounds, personality, rewards

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