Strategic Display and Response to Emotions: Developing Evidence-based Negotiation Expertise in Emotion Management (NEEM)

This article conceptualizes emotion management as a form of negotiation expertise, and integrates the nascent empirical literature on emotion in negotiation with concepts from the learning sciences literature to suggest how negotiation expertise in emotion management (NEEM) can be taught. We argue that NEEM differs from emotional intelligence in fundamental ways, and that it consists of sensitivity to strategically relevant emotional cues, ability to strategically display and respond to emotions in negotiations, and the inclination to manage emotions for superior objective and subjective negotiation performance. We propose a method of developing NEEM in the classroom and identify directions for future research.

A growing body of research that investigates the influence of emotions on negotiation processes and outcomes (for a review, see Barry, Fulmer, & Goates, 2006; Li & Roloff, 2006) suggests that the ability to manage emotions before, during, and following a negotiation is an important negotiation skill. Whether emotions that surface in a negotiation are integral to the task or carried over from prior events (Lerner & Keltner, 2000), negotiators inevitably encounter their own felt and displayed emotions, as well as emotions displayed by their counterparts. We suggest that emotion management is a domain of expertise that allows negotiators to leverage the benefits of emotions and avoid their potential pitfalls. A negotiator may want to leverage emotions because they can serve as sources of strategic information (e.g., Forgas, 2001; Van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2004a) and influence (e.g., Barry, 1999; Forgas, 2001; Kopelman, Rosette, & Thompson, 2006). We propose that emotion management in negotiations, or the leveraging of emotions through strategic display of one’s own emotions (Barry, 1999; Frank, 1988; Kopelman et al., 2006) and strategic response to emotions displayed by others (Kopelman, Gewurz, & Sacharin, 2008), is a skill that can be taught. In this article, we conceptualize emotion management in negotiation as a form of expertise, review relevant research, identify gaps in the current state of knowledge on emotion management in negotiations, and propose a method of developing such expertise in a classroom setting