NEGOTIAION AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS
INTRODUCTION
Traditionally employment relations are regulated by collective labour agreements. Collective agreements are used to regulate the rights and obligation of the employer and employee and topics such as contracts, working hours and wages.
DEFINITION
Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties intended to reach a beneficial outcome over one or more issues where a conflict exists with respect to at least one of these issues. This beneficial outcome can be for all of the parties involved, or just for one or some of them. It is aims to resolve points of difference to gain advantage for an individual or collective or to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests. It is often conducted by putting forward a position and making small concessions to achieve an agreement. The degree to which the negotiating parties trust each other to implement the negotiated solution is a major factor in determining whether negotiations are successful. Negotiation occurs organization including business nonprofit and within and between governments as well as in sales and legal proceedings and in personal situations such as marriage, divorce, parenting etc.
THE CONTEXT OF NEGOTIATION
According to words of patil 1993 who stated that collective negotiation does not take place in isolation and neither does it depend just on labor and management alone. But negotiation is influenced by some collective negotiation process they include the following factors:
- Industrial factors: this include such things as the size of plant the manufacturing organization production patterns, technological and the importance of the job or bargaining groups.
- Economic factors: these include inflating growth or recession electricity of labor demand government polices the type of marketing etc.
- Timing: negotiation also depends on the time or era. The type of negotiation depends on whether the country is at war or peace etc.
TYPES OF NEGOTIATION
- Conjunctive or distributive negotiation: this is also called positional or hard bargaining negotiation. It is based on the principle ‘my gain is yours loss and your gain is my loss’ that this one parties win over the other.
- Cooperative or integrative negotiation: it is a set of techniques that attempts to improve the quality and like hood of negotiated agreement by advantage.
- Productivity negotiation: though this form of bargaingboth employer and employee enjoy the benefit in the form of increased production and increased respectively.
OBJECTIVES OF NEGOTIATION
It benefits both the employer and employee
It keeps the outside i.e. the government at bay
It facilitates the speedy implementation of decisions arrived at