Negotiation Planning and Preparation in Practice

While scholars agree that planning and preparation is key to a negotiation’s effectiveness, negotiation research has largely focused solely on what happens at the negotiation table and little is known about what occurs in preparation for a negotiation meeting. This paper aims to redress the balance by clarifying which preparation and planning activities are undertaken to conduct a complex business negotiation compared to the recommendations found in the literature. In contrast to the majority of negotiation research this study follows a qualitative research design multiple methods of inquiry and draws upon data grounded in a large global industrial company. The results suggest that a significant number of activities recommended in the literature concerning negotiation preparation and planning do not take place in the real-world. In addition, the study demonstrated the inherent weakness of relying on an open-ended survey as the sole data source through which to understand an internal-organizational phenomenon.