Advanced negotiation: should you choose the most confident negotiator?
When choosing someone to represent an organisation, managers often favour the person who defends their estimates without hesitation. The more precise managerial question, however, is whether that confidence is a reliable criterion for assigning a negotiation mandate.
What the literature establishes
Don A. Moore and Paul J. Healy (2008, Psychological Review) distinguish three phenomena often grouped together as overconfidence: overestimating one's performance, believing oneself better than others, and placing excessive precision on one's estimates. These phenomena do not necessarily move together and respond differently to task difficulty. Someone may therefore doubt their standing among peers while being overly certain about the price the other party will accept.
Why self-assessment is not enough
Justin Kruger and David Dunning (1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) found that, in humour, grammar and logical reasoning tasks, the lowest-performing participants substantially overestimated their performance and relative standing. Their interpretation points to a metacognitive difficulty: some of the skills needed to succeed are also needed to recognise one's mistakes. This mechanism gives reason to check professed judgement, but does not demonstrate that the most assertive negotiators are the least competent.
The premature conclusion
Concluding that managers should choose the most hesitant person would merely replace one shortcut with another. Confidence in conducting a discussion and judgement calibration—the alignment between certainty and accuracy—are separate dimensions to assess. When assigning a mandate, the issue is less about penalising a categorical tone than checking how someone distinguishes established facts, assumptions and unknowns. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot decide
These studies do not directly compare purchasing or sales managers conducting real negotiations. They therefore provide neither an optimal confidence threshold nor a validated method for selecting negotiators. In practice, assessing someone on a single agreement is also unreliable: the outcome depends on the mandate, the balance of power and events beyond that person's control.
A practical check in Vevey
In Vevey, where global food businesses, corporate headquarters and Riviera SMEs interact, SHR's « Négociation avancée » programme can provide a setting for a calibration exercise, without presenting it as a selection test. Before each negotiation in a defined series, participants record and date the probability of two observable events: receiving a written counterproposal before the agreed deadline and securing acceptance of a precisely identified clause. After that deadline, a log matches each forecast to the outcome, with supporting documents, and compares the average stated probability with the observed frequency for each event type. This gap does not capture negotiation competence as a whole, but makes one dimension verifiable that verbal confidence leaves invisible. To go further: explore the Advanced Negotiation training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Advanced Negotiation in Vevey
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