A participant once asked me Google says...Bargaining is just a one way demand for the reduction in the price, or additional benefits or perks. In other words it is price haggling. Negotiation on the other hand is the discussions to come to an agreement on the give-and-take of the two or more parties. It is to give what the other party wants and to ask for what you want. If this is so then is bargaining always associated with money?
If that's the case... Lets take the example that you mentioned in the class of bringing $200M technology to Singapore from US. In that case, why is that called as Negotiation & not Bargaining. Another example is the Khandahar airplane hijack episode to get the 180 odd passengers released by the Indian Government – Why is that also not called as bargain but as negotiation? Can you please help me clear the confusion?
I appreciated this doubt because such doubts bring about a lot of de-weeding of thoughts that cause confusion. Certainly many must be having such thoughts too hence I wish to bring in some clarity in this matter.
Negotiation majorly deals with understanding the underlying interests of each of the negotiating parties – In the case of an organizational set up there are a lot of parties or stake holders whose interests and underlying motivations need to be understood – the HR have their own so also the brand/ marketing group, the operations look at things their way and have their interests to be take into consideration so also the other segments and, it is after understanding the various interests and pooling them together that a lot of sorting is done which enables one to finally agree to some/ many and some may be conflicting with your own interests. It is here that the stage of classification of interests and mapping of interests is done so as to arrive at a meeting point for the parties (this is visualized and may be a point to strive for). This stage may then lead to bargaining as the next step so that you understand the gain factor for you and reach a positive bargaining zone and then conclude the deal.
In the case of the Hijack as mentioned by you – here too there are a lot of stakeholders involved – one the hijackers, two the country where the aircraft was permitted to land, three the law of the land (of the countries involved), four the life of all the hostages and five the relatives – kith & kin of the hostages; many more are also there – the international human rights issues, the UN intervention or any other segment. Don’t you think each have their interests to be met? more over the negotiator (the prime person who is speaking up with the hijackers) may have some hidden interests of visibility or publicity or political motives or get prominence as the peoples man etc. When you have so many stakeholders look at the amount of interests that can be pooled and then to take a decision on these is extremely difficult. For some like the Entebbe operation of Israel the kind of action to be taken is more important keeping in view of the non recurrence of such acts in the future this can be an interest too. Therefore the term possibly used may be Negotiation as here there are some strategic moves & decisions that are also to be honoured and adhered to.
It is not that bargaining is restricted to money or revolves around money – lets consider an example where a my consumer commodities company is dealing with another. It this case I may be bargaining for say my commodities to be put on the visibility stands at their outlets in say 60% of cities and say 40% for their owned products. And I may say that their products will be put in our outlets as visibility zones/ racks in 60% of our cities or whatever and there can be an increase or decrease here looking at each others gain factor. Here we let the people involved know how much they would gain if they did this and how much we would gain if we did it this way. It need not be money at all – it can be anything that we feel would be useful such that we gain from the business together.
I short it can be said that Negotiation is the Superset and bargaining is the Subset and the most important subset of this Superset.