The Measurement Of Negotiating Ability: Evidence From India

Conflicts are an ever present reality; and, we see that with an increase in psychological maturity at workplaces, conflicts are increasingly being handled through negotiations. While contemporary literature and tools deal with negotiating strategy, tools and techniques, what they miss out on is negotiating ability. The primary premise of this paper is that behind these tools used in negotiations, is the individual ability to grapple with such interactions. The paper draws from an earlier work on the morphology of dispute handling capability to generate items for negotiating ability. The research was carried out in three phases. In the first phase, thirty incidents of dispute from Mahabharata - an Indian epic about a war transcending human race and its complexities - were outlined and subsequently analyzed to draw insights into negotiating and the capability required to negotiate. In the second phase, thirty exploratory in-depth interviews were carried out with executives to obtain an insight into the concept of negotiating ability using the critical incident technique. In the third phase of the research, findings from the qualitative methods were validated through survey method. The emerging scale along with the sub- scales shows robust psychometric properties and is expected to be useful for academics and practitioners alike.