Appunti di strategie comunicative e negoziali lingua inglese

Strategie comunicative e negoziali lingua inglese

Class project: negotiation and movies

• How is negotiation represented in movies?
• Which aspects are represented?
• Which strategies are utilized?
• How is rapport managed?

Select a movie containing negotiation scenes from the list on BB + vedi slide. 28/02/2019

Task-based learning

It is a discipline of language teaching, a kind of learning built around a specific activity. In order to reach an outcome, it is fundamental to use language; it makes language real and it enables people to improve language. It is very popular nowadays and many activities are built around this idea. It is assumed that people, when working on a task, work together and use language.

Advantages of TBL: language is used for a genuine purpose, meaning that real communication should take place.

Aim of TBL: to integrate all the 4 skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing listening and reading are the receptive skills and are absorbed earlier, while speaking and writing are the productive skills).

CLIL: example of task-based learning (use of English as lingua franca in this case).

Results of a questionnaire: the Anglo-American approach is more practical/learner centered (=more focus on students and their contributions/work). The Anglo-American way of teaching is different from the Italian one.

Employability skills

They are necessary for getting/keeping a job and being successful in it.

Transferable skills

They are not fixed for a specific sector, but can be transferred to other sectors or jobs.

Communication skills

• Oral and written communication
• Non-verbal communication: kinesis (body movements), tone of the voice
• Active listening: it means listening with all the senses. Active listeners are recognizable. It is easier to communicate for the speaker
• Giving and receiving feedback: in an effective and constructive way

Interpersonal skills

• Teamwork
• Negotiation: method by which people try to reach agreements and improve (or at least not damage) relationships. Conflicts may rise on various issues
• Problem solving: overcoming the barriers which prevent the achievement of an objective, being able to plan
• Decision making: it is a part of problem solving. Decisions can be made on the basis of intuition or of rational processes, but also of both.

1/03/2019

• Building rapport: state of understanding which enables speaking communication.
• Empathising: the same of sympathetic. The person understands the feels/emotions of the other people.
• Using tact and collaboration

Critical thinking skills

• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Decision making
• Negotiating

Critical thinkers: they can imagine different solutions, they are innovative, come up with new ideas, they see things in another perspective. They are active and passive learning, they always collect and analyze data. The critical thinker is somebody who can see the logical connection between ideas. Critical think = to think clearly and rationally.

Life-long learning: ability to continue learning. To build up with the knowledges = apprendimento continuo.

Presentation skills

• Selecting and organising content
• Delivering the presentation
• Managing time
• Coping with anxiety

Personal development skills

Negotiation: Process through which two or more parties who are in conflict over outcomes attempt to reach agreement. It is the constructive, positive alternative to haggling or arguing; it is aimed at building agreement rather than winning a battle. Negotiation occurs among business people (suppliers who negotiate with customers/team discussions to determine aims or processes/ negotiation between management and staff who can discuss tasks or work/ situation in which the management negotiates with trade unions/negotiation in movies, for examples when people are hostages/negotiation in politics).

Why learn to negotiate?

There are many situations in which there is more than one potential outcome. There are benefits in learning how to negotiate both to individuals and to businesses.

Benefits to individuals: better outcomes; no bad feeling (linked to rapport management); better understanding of other's aims, motivations and beliefs; better relationships; less stress.

Benefits to businesses: better deal making; more opportunities for development; better relationships; less stress.

7/03/2019

Getting to yes + video Positional bargaining

It is the most common form of negotiation. It consists in taking and giving up positions and in telling the counterparts what you want.

Dangers: locking themselves into positions; not paying attention to underlying interests, which remain submerged; taking an extreme position; deceiving; making small concessions.

Tactics: dragging feet; threatening to walk out; stonewalling (refusing to provide information)

Risks: time-consuming; no agreement.

Positional bargaining can be applied not only to individual negotiations, but also to group negotiations.

Multiparty negotiation: the different members have different constituents. The presence of many coalitions is a typical situation. It is more difficult to reach an agreement, because once a common position is reached, the coalition tends not to abandon it.

Positional bargaining can be:

• Hard: the parties see each other as enemies
• Soft: the negotiators' attitude is friendlier. It is adopted when the counterpart is seen as a friend and not as an enemy. It enables the negotiators to maintain a relationship. Features:
  • The negotiators make offers and concessions
  • The relationship is characterized by trust
  • The parties are generally friendly
  • The parties try to avoid confrontation (by making concessions)

Risk: one party plays the soft game and the other the hard game. It's ok if both parties play soft or hard.

The author of "Getting to yes" sees a choice for the negotiators: they can adopt hard or soft positional bargaining. The alternative to soft or hard positional bargaining suggested by him is a new kind of negotiation, called principled negotiation.

28/03/2019

ANALISI DI SCANDAL + RANSOM (mancano)

14/03/2019

Value claiming negotiation: the two parties have conflicting goals (ex. seller vs buyer party wants to achieve as much as possible and has a reservation price in mind, that the other does not know and therefore cannot push).

N.B. A reservation price is a limit on the price of a good or service. On the demand side, it is the highest price that a buyer is willing to pay; on the supply side, it is the lowest price at which a seller is willing to sell a good or service.

Distributive negotiation

It is based on competition among the parties who will claim the most value? This kind of negotiation is:

• Confrontational
• Win-lose (=distributive) term that comes from game theory and refers to the possible outcomes of a negotiation. The term applies to the perception of the parties: win negotiation (the outcome is better than expected), lose negotiation (the outcome is worse than expected). Different people can consider the same result as positive or negative.

In distributive negotiation, the parties compete over the distribution of a fixed sum of value. Therefore, the parties have conflicting goals, they want to gain as much as possible. Resources are fixed/limited. The goal is to maximize one's own share.

Distributive bargaining is based on the principle of competition, which is likely to result in a win-lose outcome. It is based on positions, so distributive negotiation is the same as positional bargaining (it may be hard or soft). The parties are not very flexible (limited flexibility) and there is limited focus on relationships, because the parties focus on short-term gains, risking long-term losses.

If you are engaged in distributive negotiation, you will try not to reveal important information about yourself, but you will try to find out as much as possible about the other party (ex. weaknesses, reservation price, the reasons why he wants to achieve an agreement, his interests and constraints, the point at which he is going to leave the negotiation table, his other options).

Integrative negotiation

It is based on collaboration among the parties how can the parties create mutual value? The parties can realize mutual gains. Each party will try to achieve a positive result about specific subjects. This kind of negotiation is:

• Collaborative
• Interest-based: the parties explore each other's interests. Each party will give up on issues that are not crucial
• Win-win: it does not necessarily mean that both parties achieve what they want, but each party tries to get what it values most and gives up less critical factors (it is possible when there are multiple issues at stake).

It is based on the principle that we all can win, on mutual interests and on overcoming differences.

Effects of integrative negotiation on:

• Decision making: in IN this process is more flexible
• Creativity: in IN there is more space for it
• Relationship building: in IN it will be better
• Agreements: in IN they are likely to result in win-win outcomes

When engaged in integrative negotiation, don't:

• Hurt the counterpart
• Be coercive/exploitative
• Be aggressive

When engaged in integrative negotiation, do:

• Help the counterpart at little cost to you and have the counterpart help you at little cost for them.
• Share information

What kind of information should you share for a negotiation to be integrative?

• The reasons why the parties want the deal
• Constraints
• Options

How to create value? By including multiple issues. In business, emphasis is not just on price, but on quality, delivery terms, payments, relationship, finding resources.

Issues in win-win negotiations: sometimes the parties' interests do not compete. The negotiator's dilemma is: should I compete for as a big share as possible or should I collaborate? Actually, in most negotiations there are both distributive and integrative elements.

Negotiation: focus on language

Speech acts theory:

• J.L Austin in "How to do things with words" claims that basically when we are saying something, we are doing something
• J.R. Searle formulated a taxonomy of speech acts, so he classified various speech acts. He stated that utterances have a propositional content (the truth statement an utterance has) and an elocutionary force (what the speaker does when talking).

It has been elaborated a coding system that places speech acts along a scale ranging from integrative to distributive speech acts are classified along a scale.

• Agreeing with another's position = comply integrative speech act
• Threatening punitive action = threat to take action distributive speech act

This study was carried out by asking two different coders to code the utterances; they could give different scores to the same utterance. In case they disagreed, the most distributive interpretation was chosen. There were also cases in which the two coders gave very different interpretations.

The speech acts which occur in the first part of the negotiation enable one to predict its outcome. If there are integrative speech acts, the negotiation is likely to end in a win-win solution and vice versa. It is useful for negotiators. Parties can:

• Determine the nature of the speech acts
• Predict the likelihood of an agreement
• Monitor their tone they can decide what kind of strategy to adopt.

15/03/2019

Principled negotiation

Principled negotiation (first explained in "Getting to yes") is a kind of win-win approach. It is an interest-based approach which focuses on conflict management. It is used mostly in North America.

The method: 4 principles (explained in the book)

• Separate the people from the problem
• Focus on interests, not positions
• Generate a variety of possibilities
• Insist on objective criteria