We all know them: those friends, family members, and coworkers who always seem to score a great deal in their negotiations, even as their counterpart walks away satisfied as well.
What special qualities do these ace negotiators have? A variety of individual differences—such as intelligence, confidence, and creativity—could explain why some people seem to routinely achieve stellar results at the bargaining table. But one factor that has stood out in an emerging body of research is emotional intelligence in negotiation.
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What Is Emotional Intelligence in Negotiation?
According to researchers J.D. Mayer and Peter Salovey, emotional intelligence has four components, presented here with negotiation examples:
- Emotion perception: the ability to recognize emotions in yourself and others. This might include noticing when you feel impatient in a negotiation or when your counterpart seems upset.
- Emotional facilitation: the ability to use emotions to improve your outcomes, including your performance on tasks. If you register that you are feeling anxious in the week leading up to an important negotiation, for example, you might devote extra time to preparing.
- Emotional understanding: having accurate knowledge about relationships between emotions and situations. This might mean connecting the annoyance you’re experiencing during a negotiation to your counterpart’s indecisiveness.
- Emotional regulation: the ability to manage your own emotions and others’ emotions. In negotiation, this might mean noticing that your counterpart is upset and pausing the substantive conversation to inquire about their feelings.
Measuring Emotional Intelligence in Negotiation
Some researchers have studied emotional intelligence and negotiation by having participants self-report their level of emotional intelligence on questionnaires. For example, participants might be asked to rate their agreement on a scale from one to five with statements like this: “I easily recognize my emotions as I experience them.”
However, many researchers believe that having participants self-report their emotional intelligence leads to biased, inaccurate results. After all, most of us lack the knowledge and experience needed to assess whether we are better than others at reading people’s emotions and regulating our own emotions. And, because overconfidence is widespread, we are likely to assume we’re more emotionally intelligent than those around us. Indeed, negotiation research that relies on subjective reports of emotional intelligence has generated inconclusive results.
A better understanding of any real effects of emotional intelligence in negotiation can be reached by directly assessing people’s emotional intelligence, many researchers believe. In such studies, participants might be rated on their ability to accurately identify emotions such as disgust, anger, or surprise that people are expressing in photographs or videos. Through such methods, people’s relative level of emotional intelligence can be easily compared and then checked against their performance in negotiation exercises.
Those who score high on measures of emotional intelligence might be particularly adept at such negotiation skills as inducing cooperation in their counterparts, winning concessions, and ensuring that all parties involved are satisfied with the final outcome of a negotiation, according to researchers Ingrid Smithey Fulmer and Bruce Barry.
Emotion Recognition and Negotiation Performance
Emotional intelligence has been found to foster positive relationships between negotiating counterparts. In one study, participants who scored high on an assessment of their ability to understand emotion had more satisfied counterparts in a subsequent negotiation exercise. Their counterparts also liked these negotiators more and had a greater desire to negotiate with them in the future.
In other research, emotional intelligence has been linked to superior negotiating performance. In a study conducted in Switzerland, for example, researcher Katja Schlegel and her colleagues paired up 130 participants and assigned them to engage in a hypothetical job negotiation exercise involving eight issues, including salary and vacation days. There were opportunities for participants to cooperate, compete, and trade across issues.
Before or after the exercise, participants were measured on their general mental ability and various aspects of emotional intelligence, including their ability to recognize people’s emotions and their level of emotional understanding. Somewhat surprisingly, the results showed that general mental ability did not correlate with participants’ negotiation outcomes. However, those who scored high on emotion recognition and emotional understanding tended to achieve higher joint gains (gains for both parties) in the negotiation exercise.
Negotiators who were adept at emotion recognition also were perceived by their counterparts as more cooperative and likable. The results showed that the ability to accurately read others’ emotions was a better predictor of negotiation outcomes than a more general measure of emotional intelligence.
In a study conducted in Singapore, researcher Hilary Anger Elfenbein and her colleagues also linked emotion recognition ability to better negotiation outcomes. Specifically, those who scored high on this type of emotional intelligence “both cooperated more effectively to create greater value for the pair and also competed more effectively to capture a greater proportion of the value for themselves,” the authors write.
Together, the growing research on emotional intelligence in negotiation suggests that those who are particularly adept at reading and understanding emotions improve outcomes for everyone involved. We can all work to improve our emotional intelligence in negotiation by practicing active listening and soliciting feedback from trusted colleagues on our negotiation behavior.
We thank University of Zurich researcher Vera Hampel for advising on this article.
What other aspects of emotional intelligence in negotiation would you like researchers to study?
Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills
Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
