ASSESSING NEGOTIATORS’ PROFICIENCY WITH A NEGOTIATION ROLE PLAY Developments In Business Simulation & Experiential Learning, Volume 24, 1997 88 ASSESSING NEGOTIATORS’ PROFICIENCY WITH A NEGOTIATION ROLE PLAY John K. Butler, Jr. Clemson University ABSTRACT This paper addresses the possibility of using an experiential negotiating role-play as an instrument for assessing students’ proficiency in and understanding of negotiation. The role-play is a modified version of an existing one, AFTER NAFTA (Butler, 1996). The new version, appropriate for assessment purposes, is described. THE JAPANESE ARE COMING: AN ASSESSMENT TOOL The learning objectives of this exercise are: (a) to explore the effects of trust, information sharing, and conflict styles on negotiated outcomes; (b) to demonstrate the need to determine whether goals are compatible before deciding on a conflict style; (c) to illustrate two types of integrative agreements, logrolling and bridging; and (d) to give an example of two faces of power, personal and socialized. THE JAPANESE ARE COMING is a negotiating role-play involving two negotiators and one observer. For purposes of assessment, the observer should be a trained graduate student or a faculty member. The negotiators play the roles of mayors of adjacent towns. Their task is threefold: (a) agree on a location for a new Japanese manufacturing plant -- hence the name of the role- play, (b) calculate the total income or loss from locating the plant where agreed, and (c) achieve an important, personal goal. The observer’s job is to report on the process and outcomes of the negotiation. Role of Mayor Lewis of Lakeview, PA You are Mayor Lewis of Lakeview, PA, a medium-sized, mostly working class town. Unemployment in your town is currently near 15%. You have learned that the Kokishi Company, of Japan, is planning to build a new manufacturing plant in your area. Such a plant would provide jobs for all your townspeople who want to work. One thing about Lakeview that Kokishi likes is Lakeview Technical College, which specializes in employee training. Lakeview Tech is denoted by an asterisk on your map. The problem is that Lakeview does not have an emergency facility with squad members trained in handling potential hazards from the chemicals that Kokishi will be using. It will cost Lakeview $300,000 to build an emergency facility and hire trained technicians. Lakeview has five types of zones: open space, residential, woodlands, parks, and commercial. (See Simulation and Gaming. December, 1996, for the required maps.) Locating the plant in some of these zones would cost the town a net loss in taxes and other costs per acre. Locating it in other zones would bring a net gain per acre. These per-acre cost and benefit figures are on the map. Kokishi’s criteria for locating their plant are the following: 1. The plant needs exactly 200 acres of land. This is how much Kokishi will buy. 2. No more than one zone can be between the zone containing the plant and the zone containing an emergency facility. 3. No more than one zone can be between the zone containing the plant and the zone containing a technical college. You are thinking about asking the town finance committee to study the feasibility of building an emergency facility. But, before doing that, you decide to discuss the situation with Mayor Watson of Waterville, PA, the town just south of Lakeview. You have heard that Mayor Watson is trying to attract Kokishi to Waterville. You have learned from your experiences during the past years that you can not trust Mayor Watson personally. There has been a high level of fear and suspicion between the two of you. Virtually all the citizens of Lakeview want very much to attract Kokishi to your town. However, your primary, number-one, Life-long dream has always been for your son, Developments In Business Simulation & Experiential Learning, Volume 24, 1997 89 Joe, to go to the University of Pennsylvania. Joe has earned good grades in high school and wants to study psychology in college. You have been in touch with the University of Pennsylvania about a scholarship in psychology, but all they wanted to talk about was a scholarship in sociology. Ironically, the person you talked with said that any high school student with decent grades who applied for the sociology scholarship would be quite certain to get it. You feel frustrated because that won’t help Joe at all, and you can’t afford to send him to college without a scholarship. You would gladly forget all about the Kokishi plant if Joe could have a chance at a college education. Role of Mayor Watson of Waterville, PA The role of Mayor Watson is identical to that of Mayor Lewis except that Waterville has an emergency facility, Watson’s son is named Mike, Watson knows about a scholarship in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Mike wants to study sociology. The roles allow two types of win-win, integrative agreements -- logrolling and bridging. First, there are ways the negotiators can logroll by trading items of low value for items of high value. They can locate the plant on the border within one zone of both the technical college in Lakeview and the emergency facility in Waterville. Thus both towns can avoid the $300,000 building expenses. This issue represents socialized power, used for achieving organizational goals. Second, the negotiators can bridge by refocusing on what they want most --educations for their sons. If they share the relevant information, each negotiator discovers that his/her opponent knows about a scholarship for his/her son and they can swap scholarships. This issue addresses personal power used for achieving selfish goals. Scoring for Assessment Students’ negotiating proficiency can be scored in terms of both inputs and outcomes, all of which are reported by the observer. The measured inputs include the negotiators’ understanding of their roles, initial trust expectations, conflict style (pursuit of the negotiators’ own and their opponent’s interests), and information sharing (relevance, accuracy, and completeness). Outputs include the fairness of the agreement (equality of their towns’ profit and both sons’ receipt of scholarships), the efficiency of the process (time taken to discover the integrative solutions and to agree on terms), the efficiency of the outcome (lack of formal precautions taken to ensure fulfillment of the agreement, and the effectiveness of the negotiation (achievement of both the social and personal goals -- successful location of the plant in a profitable zone and receipt of the scholarship). Although the inputs and outcomes are important in that they indicate how well a negotiator performed in that particular negotiation, a more important criterion for assessment is students’ understanding of the dynamics of the negotiation. This understanding is crucial because it allows students to generalize from the specific negotiation they conducted in class to more important negotiations they will conduct in their personal and professional careers. Students’ understanding can be assessed through their explanation of the activities, communications, and feelings (the emergent system) that occurred during the negotiation. I believe strongly that such an explanation should be driven by one or more theories. (In my MBA courses, I call them conceptual models or tools.) Therefore, I assess students’ understanding of role-play dynamics by requiring them to write rigorous, structured analyses of the role-plays. I expect students to apply a number of conceptual models they have learned in the course. For THE JAPANESE ARE COMING and other negotiation role plays, these models include: (a) Zand’s (1972) model of the dynamics of mist, (b) Thomas’s (1990) and Rahim’s (1992) dual concern model of conflict styles, (c) Fisher and Ury’s (1981) approach to principled negotiation, and (d) McClelland and Burnham’s (1976) model of socialized vs. personal power. Note: See Simulation and Gaming, December, 1996, for copies of the required maps of Lakeview and Waterville, instructor’s briefing, Kokishi president’s briefing, pro-forma income statements, observers’ report form, negotiators’ report form, and references. Table of Contents Volume 24, 1997 Incorporating Computer Telephony into the MIS Course A Learner Oriented Infrastructure for videoconferencing Based Distance Education Courses The Identification of Temporally Related Structural Elements of the Experiential Component of Electronic Spreadsheet Tasks Does Involvement Influence Learning from Simulation Participation? Some Relationships with Helpfulness and Performance Outcomes Musings on Business Garne Performance Evaluation Performance on a TE Simulation: What does it represent? The Business Policy Game: An International Simulation - An Assessment Tool Students in Free Enterprise as Experiential Learning The Role of Computer Models in Wargames: A Practitioner's view Using Focus Groups as a Tool to Research Learning: A Demonstration and a Discussion Using Medical Simulations to Teach Multi-Cultural Diversity Using the World Game to Internationalize International Exchange Game Community Services Needs Assessment: An Innovative Approach Introducing Students to Potential Total Quality Management Ethical Dilemmas Privacy in the Workplace: A Situational Analysis Antecedents of Learning in Simulations Demonstrating the Learning Effectiveness of Simulation: Where we are and Where we need to go The Use of Computer Simulations as a Pedagogical Aid in Teaching Management Information Systems Evaluating Simulation Learning in a Distant Learning Instructional Model Financial Engineering of Global Investments The Labor History Game: Playing with the Past Perks Participation Assessing Negotiator's Proficiency with a Negotiation role-play The Art of Negotiating Enhancing Learning and Employee Development through the Assessment of Learning Pedagogy Preferences across selected Dimensions of Culture: A Preliminary Investigation Cooperative Learning: What are we Learning? Effective Use of Mastery Based Experiential learning in a Project Course to improve skills in system analysis and Design Simulations and Learning: Can we prove a relationship? (Seminar) Predicting and Reviewing NYSE Stock Prices by use of Basic Statistical Analysis and Logic Toy Car Depreciation Exercise ABSEL as Home Community: An Interactive Exploration Service Learning: Linking Academic Study to Community Development and Business Enhancement Ability of Efficient Evaluation of Knowledge-Based Management Strategies Corporate Ethics Training Programs Modeling Attributes in Demand Functions of Computerized Business Simulations: An Extension of Teach's Gravity Flow Algorithm Expert Systems Combined with Neutral Networks: Tools to Benefit the Marketing Researcher Computer Game Design: New Directions for Intercultural Simulation Game Designers Consistency in Simulation Performance over Time and Across Simulation Games The Impact of an Artificial Market Leader on Simulation Competitor's Strategies Business Plans, Case Studies, and Total Enterprise Simulations: A Natural Co-existence An Exploration into the Non-Use of Business Simulations The Market Game: Interactive Learning Through Market Simulation Plotting Brand Trajectories with the COMPLETE PPM package: A Market Segmentation Analysis and Positioning Tool Me and Mine Inc: An Exercise in Management Theory Learning to Differentiate Leadership from Managerial Position Business Ethics Survey: A Perspective from the Retail Industry Experiential Learning in Demand Analysis for an Agricultural Commodity Marketing on the Internet: A Pedagogical Exercise College Students Need Simple Computer Simulations, Especially for International Business Courses An Analysis of Student Attitudes, Performance, and Strategies in a Simulation Competition Based on a Controlled Product-Market-Entry Game Structure The Crystal Enterprise: Application of a Non-Computerized Simulation Model in a Process of Organizational Change Threshold: A Windows-Based Behaviorally Oriented Total Enterprise Simulation Coaching Business Game Teams Using a Decision Variable Optimizer Rock and Roll is here to Stay: Enhancing Experiential Pedagogy with Musical Exercises An Example of Business Process Analysis Simulation for Customer Software Support The Use of Business Gaming in Hong Kong Academic Institutions Using the Integrative International Simulation INTOPIA Mark 2000 in a Concentrated MBA Curriculum A Group Experience as an Integrated Part of the Core Management Course Empowered Learning in the Classroom The Inter-Group Interaction: An Innovative Approach to Cooperative Learning Courses that Utilize Student Team: An Approach to enhancing their Effectiveness Thoughts about the Measurement of Learning: The Case for Guided Learning and Associated Measurement Issues Measuring Student Learning Using Business Simulations: A Theory Based Perspective On the Use of PC Fingame in an Undergraduate Finance Course How Managers get Things Done: A Virtual Soundbite Internet Experiential learning in the Principals of Marketing Classroom: A Pedagogical Approach Current Student Perceptions Relative to Business Simulations Beyond Capitalism: Designing Business Policy and Social Justice The Use of Boards of Directors to Evaluate Reports and Presentations in an Undergraduate Business Policy Course Beacon Lumber: An Experiential Introduction to Financial Accounting The Application of Organizational Motivation Principles: The Experiential Business Simulation Motus Manufacturing Avoiding a Bogey: Grading Case Discussions Scientifically Communicating Consumer Behavior II: A Modified Exercise Using Personal Consumption Journals in Condensed Courses Designing Instruments for Assessing the Effectiveness of Simulations, (Seminar) 360º Performance Feedback: Appraisal vs. Assessment The Cafeteria Approach to Managing an Academic Career: Remaining Non-Perishable while Doing Your Own Thing An Experiential Exercise Related to Person-Organization Fit and it's Consequences For Today's Dynamic and Changing World, Business Simulations need to be expanded to encompass Much Greater Complexity: A Demonstration The Incident Process: A Case in Reverse Contextually-Anchored Business Simulations The Energy Factor: Building Motivation in the Simulation Gaming Environment The Design of an Internet Game