Intimidation
Many tactics can be gathered under the general label of intimidation. What they have in common is that they all attempt to force the other party to agree by means of an emotional ploy, usually anger or fear. For example, the other party may deliberately use anger to indicate the seriousness of a position. One of the authors had the following experience:
Once while I was negotiating with a car salesman he lost his temper, destroyed his written notes, told me to sit down and listen to him, and went on to explain in a loud voice that this was the best deal in the city and if I did not accept it that evening I should not bother returning to that dealership and wasting his time. I didn’t buy the car and I haven’t been back, nor have any of the students in my negotiation classes, to whom I relate this story every year! I suspect that the salesman was trying to intimidate me into agreeing to the deal and realized that if I went elsewhere his deal would not look as good. What he didn’t realize was that I had asked the accountant at the dealership for further information about the deal and had found that he had lied about the value of a trade-in; he really lost his cool when I exposed the lie.
Another form of intimidation includes increasing the appearance of legitimacy. When legitimacy is high, set policies or procedures are in place for resolving disputes. Negotiators who do not have such policies or procedures available may try to invent them and then impose them on the other negotiator while making the process appear legitimate. For example, policies that are written in manuals or preprinted official forms and agreements are less likely to be questioned than those that are delivered verbally; long and detailed loan contracts that banks use for consumer loans are seldom read completely. The greater the appearance of legitimacy, the less likely the other party will be to question the process being followed or the contract terms being proposed.
Finally, guilt can also be used as a form of intimidation. Negotiators can question the other party’s integrity or the other’s lack of trust in them. The purpose of this tactic is to place the other party on the defensive so that they are dealing with the issues of guilt or trust rather than discussing the substance of the negotiation.
To deal with intimidation tactics, negotiators have several options. Intimidation tactics are designed to make the intimidator feel more powerful than the other party and to lead people to make concessions for emotional rather than objective reasons (e.g., a new fact). When making any concession, it is important for negotiators to understand why they are doing so. If one starts to feel threatened, assumes that the other party is more powerful (when objectively he or she is not), or simply accepts the legitimacy of the other negotiator’s “company policy,” then it is likely that intimidation is having an effect on the negotiations.
If the other negotiator is intimidating, then discussing the negotiation process with him or her is a good option. You can explain that your policy is to bargain in a fair and respectful manner, and that you expect to be treated the same way in return. Another good option is to ignore the other party’s attempts to intimidate you, because intimidation can only influence you if you let it. While this may sound simplistic, think for a moment about why some people you know are intimidated by authority figures and others are not—the reason often lies in the perceiver, not the authority figure.
Another effective strategy for dealing with intimidation is to use a team to negotiate with the other party. Teams have at least two advantages over individuals in acting against intimidation. First, people are not always intimidated by the same things; while you may be intimidated by one particular negotiator, it is quite possible that other members on your team won’t be. In an ongoing negotiation in China when he was younger, one of the authors found that his Chinese counterparts were frequently changing their team members so that older and older members appeared in each subsequent negotiation session. He decided to bring a senior colleague of his own to subsequent meetings in order not to be intimidated by the age and experience of the counterparts on the other negotiating team. The second advantage of using a team is that the team members can discuss the tactics of the other negotiators and provide mutual support if the intimidation starts to become increasingly uncomfortable.
