Advanced Negotiation training in LucerneDoes having to get an agreement approved make managers better negotiators?
Managers rarely negotiate solely for themselves: they will often have to defend the agreement to senior management. Does that obligation improve their judgement, or mainly encourage them to produce a proposal that is easy to approve?
1. Accountability has no single effect
In their literature review, Jennifer S. Lerner and Philip E. Tetlock (1999, Psychological Bulletin) show that having to justify decisions can reduce some biases, but can also sustain or amplify them. Its effects depend partly on when the requirement arises and on the expectations attributed to the person evaluating the decision. Applied to negotiation, this suggests distinguishing a thorough assessment of an agreement from alignment with a superior's preferences.
2. Anticipating approval can replace scrutiny
Philip E. Tetlock, Linda Skitka and Richard Boettger (1989, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish several responses to accountability: conforming, examining the issue more broadly, or strengthening the justification for an existing position. When the evaluator's preferences are known, anticipating approval can encourage conformity; when they are unknown and accountability is expected before commitment, reasoning can become more complex. A negotiator might therefore reject a useful contractual provision not because it is disadvantageous, but because it seems difficult to defend internally.
3. The hasty conclusion: remove oversight
These studies do not demonstrate that autonomy without oversight would produce better agreements. Instead, they suggest establishing evaluation criteria before negotiation, without prematurely prescribing the outcome a superior wants brought back. Setting boundaries on risks, commitments and signing authority remains compatible with an open examination of the options. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. What the evidence cannot establish
This research concerns judgement and accountability; it does not directly demonstrate improved performance in long-term commercial negotiations. Management's preferences are also rarely unknown, even when they remain unstated. A better written justification therefore proves neither that the agreement is better nor that the negotiator genuinely considered other options.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In the canton of Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs form a business environment in which many family-owned firms combine short decision-making lines with strong regional ties. Consider a hypothetical example: a hotel manager negotiates a maintenance contract with an industrial SME while anticipating the owner's preference for a short commitment. A possible exercise within SHR's advanced negotiation programme is to document the approval criteria before the meeting — service continuity, flexibility and acceptable risks — and then request a comparison of options against those same criteria. Across a series of cases, recording the proportion with criteria documented before negotiation, and any cases where those criteria changed during approval, makes the consistency of the process verifiable without claiming that this alone measures agreement quality. To go further: explore the Advanced Negotiation training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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