Dual-Concern Theory

Managers spend a good amount of time negotiating on matters where they need to reach agreement with others, for example, on department budgets, sales contracts, terms of employment such as salary and benefits, to name just a few. Indeed, negotiation is an important part of collective decision making in all walks of life, especially in legal, political, and business settings. It is an important aspect of dispute resolution, for example, when labor and management cannot agree about a wage level, as detailed in the classic text on labor negotiation by Richard Walton and Robert McKersie. Other cases of negotiation are about deal making, wherein agreement brings value to the parties by establishing the parameters of a commercial partnership or joint venture or through an exchange. In negotiation between a buyer and a seller, for example, the seller may offer to sell an item at X dollars, and the buyer states that she will only buy it at less than X; thus they see a difference of interest on money, and the negotiation proceeds by offers and counteroffers on money and verbal statements designed to influence the other party and reconcile differences and achieve agreement and exchange. It can get complex quickly: There may be many people on multiple sides of a negotiation and multiple negotiation issues, and on each side, instead of an individual, there may be a group or even a larger collective such as an organization or a nation-state. In the latter cases, negotiators act as representatives of other’s interests as well as, or instead of, their own. David Lax and Jim Sebenius report that negotiation is a core element of management and the workplace and that it is a core managerial competency. The dual-concern theory is [Page 217]defined as a theory of negotiation behavior that posits three fundamental strategies for moving to agreement in negotiation: yielding (giving in, making a concession in the direction of the other’s benefit), contending (holding firm, trying to get the other party to agree on your terms), and problem solving (working with the other party to come up with a mutually beneficial “win-win” agreement that is good for everyone). This entry provides a brief overview of the dual-concern theory and a brief explanation of its importance to management.