Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, Second Edition, The

Ethics

The distributive aspect of negotiation may create incentives for people to violate ethical standards of interpersonal interaction. All of the tactics and strategies discussed in this chapter can be questioned in terms of whether they are ethically appropriate. There are some hard and fast rules concerning what is ethical in negotiation, but more often, there are many shades of gray. Ethics are a manifestation of cultural, contextual, and interpersonal norms that render certain strategies and behaviors unacceptable. According to Lewicki and Robinson (1998), negotiators evaluate tactics on a continuum of “ethically appropriate” to “ethically inappropriate” when deciding whether to use tactics. Between these two end points is a middle group ...