Advanced negotiation: do commercial targets encourage dishonesty?
In a negotiation, the mandate usually specifies the expected outcome more precisely than the acceptable means of achieving it. The management question is therefore specific: how can organisations maintain demanding performance standards without encouraging departures from the truth?
What the literature establishes
Maurice E. Schweitzer, Lisa D. Ordóñez and Bambi Douma (2004, Academy of Management Journal) show experimentally that unmet goals can encourage people to misrepresent their performance. In their tasks, this risk is particularly apparent when participants fall just short of the target. The finding concerns performance reporting, rather than directly describing how negotiators behave towards clients.
Maintaining an honest self-image
Nina Mazar, On Amir and Dan Ariely (2008, Journal of Marketing Research) propose a complementary mechanism: people can benefit from limited dishonesty while maintaining an honest view of themselves. Their experiments examine, among other things, how room for interpretation and attention to moral standards influence such behaviour. In negotiation, this framework invites scrutiny of justifications such as “it is only a sales presentation”, without establishing that every favourable formulation constitutes deception.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that demanding targets should be abandoned, or that an ethics declaration should be signed before every meeting. These studies do not establish that either response will be effective in a real negotiation. The useful distinction is between an ambitious outcome and explicit or tacit permission to distort information to achieve it. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
The experiments cited reproduce neither an insurer’s compliance checks, nor a bank’s contract approval procedures, nor a technology company’s repeated commercial relationships. They therefore do not establish how frequently deception occurs in Zurich negotiations. In practice, a high rate of target attainment is no more sufficient to demonstrate that the means employed were acceptable.
A practical check in Zurich
Within SHR’s “Advanced Negotiation” programme, an exercise relevant to financial services, insurance, technology and European headquarters based in Zurich is to attach a register of sensitive factual claims to the negotiating mandate: promised capabilities, exclusions, deadlines and required authorisations. For each claim, the team records supporting evidence and a person responsible for approval, then compares the register with the written proposals actually sent over one month. The indicator is the proportion of sensitive claims sent without documented approval; discrepancies must be distinguished from simple record-keeping gaps. This check does not measure the entire ethical quality of a negotiation, but it makes visible a risk that revenue figures alone leave hidden. To go further: explore the Advanced Negotiation training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Advanced Negotiation in Zurich
- advanced negotiation
- Zurich
- research
- training zurich