Describe and analyze two primary approaches to negotiating.

Negotiation is a communication tool which is carried out between two or more individuals or parties to reach an agreement on a matter under discussion. Negotiation is not a process specific to the business world. In fact we all negotiate many thing on daily basis. For example in making a decision about buying a car, the husband and wife talk about different options and each of them have their own priorities. At the end they reach a consensus on which car to buy. The process of communication about different options is a negotiation process that enable them to reach an agreement or a consensus. There are two primary approaches to negotiations. They are distributive negotiation and integrative negotiation (Beersma & De Dreu, 2002). They are described in the following.

Distributive Negotiation

In this type of negotiation two or more parties compete with each other to get a fair share of something. For example a company is allocating financial resource to its departments. Different departments may be asked to decide among them how much percent of the budget should be allocate to each department depending on the goals of the company. Different department may come forward and claim that they need to get the bigger chunk of the budget. In this kind of negotiation, there is always an opportunity that some parties may get more while other may get less. It means that there is always a possibility of a lose-win or win-lose situation.

Integrative Negotiation

In integrative negotiation, parties try to integrate their interests and achieve common grounds. This type of negotiation is aimed at creating a win-win situation and is more desired by companies than they desire distributive negotiation. This kind of negotiation can result in the formation of common value in an organization.