Negotiation Strategies for a Leader

The Team That Is Not a Team
The main teamwork problems that are occurring among the team members is that there is a lack of communication, a lack of clarity in terms of what the team’s goals are—and therefore no sense of how the team is to be successful. An effective team is one that is productive, personally satisfied, and committed to its members (Schermerhorn & Uhl-Bien, 2014). Following on that idea, teams should be motivated, committed by a shared sense of values, emotionally stable and supportive, and dedicated to achieving performance benchmarks (Schermerhorn & Uhl-Bien, 2014). As the de facto leader, Harrington has to be proactive in bringing teammates together to discuss their agenda. However, this is not happening because Harrington is mainly reactive and the team members feel that he is really in competition with Smithers and only cares about getting a promotion for himself. There is general dissatisfaction among the group as the actual leader, Vonich, has essentially washed his hands of the team and told Harrington (who has never led a team before) to handle everything. Ultimately, this comes down to Vonich being an absent leader—or, as Schyns and Schilling (2013) would say—a poor leader whose lack of good leadership and personal involvement has a negative effect on the team overall.
The leadership style that is being evidenced by Harrington is the reactive style of leadership. That evidenced by Vonich is distant. Between the two, nothing is getting achieved by the group. Instead of identifying goals, Harrington insists on more research among the members. The leadership problems that are occurring are based on the fact that the leader is a novice and does not know how to integrate the members of the team so that they are working together instead of in opposition to one another.
What should be negotiated is how to achieve new product development. Harrington wants more information so as to set the appropriate course, but the rest of the team is frustrated by the manner in which team meetings always end in arguments. No one is willing to listen. This goes against Tuckman’s five stages of group development, which state that in order for a team to become functional, it must first meet five conditions: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. These five stages are what need to be negotiated in order for the team to be successful. The forming stage is the first stage and represents the moment when the group is coming together. Often this is where anxiety, fears, doubts and questions are expressed. Harrington’s team needs to get past this stage in order to move on and become successful. Effective communication is critical to this stage. People communicate using verbal and non-verbal cues and these need to be identified by a leader who knows how to respond using social and emotional intelligence (Sanchez-Nunez, Patti & Holzer, 2015). Without a proper understanding of the different ways that people communicate (and how to respond), leadership will lack the ability to truly bring a team together. This is why Harrington is having such a difficult time. Without assistance from Vonich, it is all falling to him, and he ends up sparring with other members of team because he does not know how to listen, incorporate what they are saying into the group’s objective, and negotiate a positive outcome that all can agree to.
One way to negotiate the right outcome would be for Harrington to apply “facework,” which as Lumsden, Lumsden and Weithoff (2010) explain, is the process by which negotiation is “used to protect people’s self-face (their own image, other-face (another’s image,” and the overall face of the group (p. 280). In this manner, differences can be negotiated cooperatively so that dysfunction is not the main outcome.
Other negotiation strategies that might assist in resolving conflict among the team members could include other cooperative and supportive strategies like using assertive requests or phrasing orders in a friendly manner so that they do not come off as offensive. If Harrington could urge his team to provide more research for him in a manner that was not so off-putting, he would probably get what he was looking for in order to feel that he could make the right decision regarding product development.
Harrington could also try focusing on friendly persuasion by identifying the desired behaviors that he would like to see from his team and then using reasoning and evidence to help identify mutual values that can be respected by all the team members. Using persuasive negotiation tactics like this, Harrington could help bring the team into uniformity in terms of its outlook by uniting them under an umbrella of shared values and principles.
Harrington could also use the indirect negotiation strategy of gaining compliance by setting a supportive mood and tone so that no one at the table feels threatened. He could use others on the team to help set this tone instead of having to be the one to do it himself. This would allow him to delegate so that he is not always seen as the heavy or as a tyrannical leader who is only in it for himself. By sharing responsibilities and duties among team members Harrington also shows a more inclusive approach to negotiation and gives everyone a good feeling about moving forward. In this manner the team will feel like everyone has an opportunity to be heard, which will in term give them all more confidence about achieving a goal.
References
Lumsden, G., Lumsden, D., & Weithoff, C. (2010). Communicating in groups and teams:
Sharing leadership (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Sanchez-Nunez, M., Patti, J. & Holzer, A. (2015). Effectiveness of a leadership development program that incorporates social and emotional intelligence for aspiring school leaders. Journal of Educational Issues, 1(1), 5-9.
Schermerhorn, J., & Uhl-Bien, M. (2014). Organizational behavior (13th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Schyns, B., Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-
analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 24, 138-158.