Upgrade The Game - How To Design A Latent Negotiation Setting To Achieve Better Negotiation Outcomes

Over the past decades, companies discovered negotiations as a crucial success factor and consequently expanded in professional negotiation training. However, the more trained employees are, the more challenging it becomes to achieve better outcomes with simple tactics. Hence, companies must actively seek for opportunities beyond the negotiation table to steer the negotiation process in their desired direction. A promising opportunity that has recently gained increasing use among companies are latent negotiations, where the other party is unaware that a negotiation is taking place. However, the successfulness of this tactic has not yet been investigated. Initial findings suggest that partner choice, location, media, negotiation issues, tonality, or timing may be crucial. In this study, a survey of practitioners will be conducted to examine the key factors to consider when utilizing latent negotiations. The results of this study will enable companies to systematically use latent negotiations in order to improve their negotiation outcomes.