"Negotiation is defined as a process in which two or more parties attempt to resolve differences, solve problems and reach agreement!" .
Management 3rd edition (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter) chapter 17, PG: 546.
Negotiation plays a huge part every day in our life's, whether at work or at home someone somewhere is trying to reach a happy medium -" we seek one or more settlements that can create a win win solution" Management 3rd edition (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg and Coulter) chapter 17, PG: 546.
This is exactly what we set out to accomplish within our in class exercise, we were put in groups of four, two staff members and two students. The students were faced with the fact that they were needed by RMIT to stay for another subject in order to complete the course. This had the students in a "not so good mood" and so the task at hand was to "negotiate" with the staff members and reach an agreement.
I, being a student together with my fellow student, firstly discussed amongst ourselves the issue at hand, we did some "planning" this was for us to set our goal and to agree on what outcome we wanted to achieve. We also noted what the benefits were to us as students when we reached the goal and started to think about the staff and what was going to be in it for them and how the issue at hand was going to impact on them.
We the students decided to "Lowest acceptable result" which was that no matter what agreement we made with the staff we would not be prepared to come back the following year.
We also decided to agree on what would be the "best alternative to a negotiated agreement".
And this was to do the extra subject some how before the end of the current year.
With all this in mind we opened the negotiation with the staff by introducing ourselves, I sat next to one staff member while Leo sat next to the other, I thought this was a good strategic move, I felt by doing this we would make the staff members comfortable, but as I found out later it was not a good move, it actually intimidated the staff members.
