AN EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING SIMULATION: ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES
AND OUTCOMES IN STRATEGIC NEGOTIATION
Mary Elizabeth Moran, St. John’s University, Tobin College of Business, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Jamaica,
Queens, New York 11439, (718) 990-7402, moranm@stjohns.edu
ABSTRACT
This action research paper submission describes a novel experiential learning exercise in peer
negotiation, introducing students to organizational decision making, strategy, and creative
conflict management, addressing the importance of management education as a vehicle for
successful professional development, cultivating student core competencies in the science of
negotiation, decision making and conflict resolution, inspiring motivation towards learning tools
and techniques, honing fundamental skills required for business management best practices.
Keywords: Strategic Negotiation, Organizational Decision Making
INTRODUCTION
Historically, the field of Management, although devoted to progress and change, unfortunately,
has not successfully answered an important question of how managers and organizations truly
learn and acquire core competencies, yielding business management best practices. Thus, this
manuscript identifies a novel experiential learning simulation in peer negotiation and its’
pedagogy, that may be used to help educate and develop business students into industry
professionals with needed core competencies in strategy, negotiation and creative conflict
management.
Importantly, today’s business schools are required to change with the times and seek the best
balance between theory and practice. Because faculty members are a critical resource in any
academic institution, business faculty must continually develop new knowledge and ideas, and
transmit and interpret knowledge through teaching and learning processes with students and
professionals.
The study of business management and its’ practice takes place in a professional context that
requires an interdisciplinary and applied orientation. And, while intellectual rigor must be
critical, professional relevance is equally important. Business faculty need to have their feet
planted firmly in rigorous theory, as well as in applied business issues. Hence, business schools
need to continually move in the direction of problem or issue oriented teaching, the potential for
professional application, and a multidisciplinary approach to teaching business management best
practices.
Accordingly, novel experiential learning simulations provide the hands on portable skills
building that assist students’ professional development, while cultivating and honing managerial
core competencies within an educational setting.
LEARNING AND APPLIED PRACTICE
Undoubtedly, developmental and successful learning involves creating situations in and out of
the classroom where students are encouraged and required to read frequently, think critically,
speak fluidly and listen intently. What successful learning amounts to is getting students to think
about the subject matter, and if they are actively thinking about it, they are more likely to learn it.
Perhaps, then it is best said, that the essence of student learning is two fold; providing innovative
instruction and creative experiential learning exercises which challenge students ability to think
critically by integrating experiences that bring students closer to real world business management
practices.
Active learning, then, includes movements away from the lecture format and should consist of
group work using simulations, problem-based learning, and other approaches that truly stress
student engagement. The variety of approaches possible to achieve this end, are crucial, as
teaching is individualistic in its nature. Active learning is something we want to promote and
consistently develop within our students.
Content and Transferability
Traditionally, classroom teaching of coursework in business management is comprised of several
pedagogical approaches that integrate organizational theory with real world business
application(s). Towards this end, the use and combination of textbook and case reading(s),
project assignments and other classroom activities to facilitate integration of prescribed subject
matter and students’ professional work experiences is paramount.
Students need to be simultaneously required to prepare an in-class oral presentation that
demonstrates their mastery of essential reading materials while integrating their experience in the
business arena. And, in addition to weekly reading assignments, experiential learning exercises
that focus on managerial core competencies using self-assessment and managerial skills-building
exercises are imperative. Assessment tools that can be used are self-report questionnaires that
identify students’ managerial decision making styles, personality type(s), occupational interest
inventories, conflict management styles, leadership styles and simulations identifying core
competencies in collaborative negotiation, strategy and creative conflict resolution. Accordingly,
in treating the subject of “styles” as part of a negotiation curriculum, for example, teachers may
find that using self report questionnaires and/or objective assessments are very useful tools to
help students gain perspective on the topic at hand.
In contrast, most courses in negotiation focus typically on attention and interactions among
parties involved in actual negotiations, only. Such courses usually tend to isolate the negotiation
process from the social context within which it is embedded, or assume students need only know
about one small piece of the social context, such as the business world or the legal system.
However, a novel peer negotiation simulation encourages students to step back from the
negotiation process per se, and think more broadly about the social context within which they are
operating.
To this end, it is vital to have students think critically about how the larger social problem or
social conflict is affecting the negotiation process. Simply stated, negotiation is a process for
managing or resolving conflict that emerges within a social context. And, the context or setting
of the conflict carries within it certain norms, rules, and expectations about how the process will
be managed. Therefore, it is imperative that students simultaneously learn how to self monitor,
self regulate and self assess, while also observing their peers when engaging in negotiation.
In my classroom learning environment, prior to administering any experiential learning
simulation, students must complete and then review a compilation of numerous self assessment
questionnaires and their corresponding results. Once completed students are encouraged to share
findings of their self-assessment data, highlighting areas of strengths and limitations, honing
competencies to effectively evaluate themselves, while respecting others differences, enhancing
the classroom learning community. Correspondingly, in preparation for pairing students for
experiential learning simulations, based on student self assessment data, students can then be
grouped with peers of similar and diverse profiles to enhance their performance effectiveness.
Through the use of an experiential learning exercise in peer negotiation, students learn that no
ideal solutions or perfect answers exist for any and all business scenarios. Rather, students are
asked to learn how to critically think through the issues, problems, facts, and other information
presented in the simulation. Students must learn to think strategically, formulating plausible
assumptions about an imaginary scenario, listing problems in order of priority, designing an
action plan, outlining constraints that limit success, and then selecting the most successful
intervention to resolve the organizational problem.
In most organizations, and as depicted by experiential learning exercises, decisions are generally
made with incomplete information and some uncertainty. As a result, critical thinking is
extensively stressed and is called upon ubiquitously throughout much of the requirements in
class. Without doubt, experiential learning exercises help shape and form students’ managerial
core competencies; comprising interrelated skills and knowledge bases that enable students to
bring added value to areas of responsibility. The use of experiential learning exercises enables
students to practice and hone core managerial competencies such as risk taking and visioning,
mobilizing change and innovation, learning & applying ethical standards, benchmarking,
decision making, conflict management, managing effective communication and managing
oneself.
Contemporary Business Issues Integrated Into Classroom Dialogue(s)
As stated above, business management classes need to be driven with the integration of theory
and applied real world business practices, incorporating both textbook reading(s), experiential
skills building exercises, and self assessment tools. These inform students about their managerial
strengths and limitations, affording them an opportunity to design a developmental action plan of
personal change throughout the semester.
The enclosed peer negotiation experiential learning exercise, are individual and group based,
focusing on each student’s capabilities in managerial decision making, conflict management,
negotiation, oral and nonverbal communication, formulation, and interpretation of case study
data. Armed with essential theories and concepts derived from textbooks and lectures, students
undergo an experiential negotiation exercise that facilitates their involvement of current practices
and trends in business, as an opportunity to relate prevalent issues to learned skills.
Moreover, students must be required and encouraged to integrate textbook theory with ethical
principles, codes of ethical conduct, and ethical practices in their analysis and applied
understanding of strategic negotiation. Both textbook readings as well as assigned case studies
incorporate real world examples of well-known companies who have managed ethical issues
while deftly succeeding in strategic negotiations, demonstrating mindful ethical business
practices and critical dilemmas in their respective industry, past and present.
While participating in small groups, students are asked to focus on group processes and
outcomes. Mutual respect, brainstorming, alternative perspectives, and power of diversity are
highlighted to inform students about their own perceptual lenses, attitudes and behaviors. While
analyzing real world cases about strategic change and negotiation, students are also continuously
encouraged to address topics such as ethical practices, globalization, cross-cultural management,
technological advances in business practices, innovation and creative problem solving.
Experiential Learning Simulation: An Introduction to Strategic Negotiation
Enclosed in appendix A, is an example of a novel classroom simulation, in peer negotiation, and
experiential decision making, designed and implemented each semester in business management
classes. Students are placed in groups of two, or learning teams, and given limited data
describing a company and its requirements. During this assignment, all students are deemed
“honorary management consulting negotiators” from their respective ‘industries’, and each
student represents two companies under negotiation. Using effective decision making skills and
ethical communication between one another, the student is required to enter into a “verbal
contract” with the other party, preferably arriving at the most successful, cost effective outcome
for their company.
Moreover, students’ are not simply asked to attend to who “wins” the negotiation, but, rather
how their negotiation occurred. After the negotiation has come to a resolution, students are asked
to do an after action report. Students are required to examine the content and process, as to how
successful negotiation happens and with what strategies, techniques and communication tools.
The evaluation of the negotiating process and its outcomes, become a critical learning tool for
students, through the exploration of an alternative towards mutual consent.
Negotiation is the science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties.
The central issues of the business management courses taught, deals with the understanding of
attitudes and behaviors of individuals, groups and organizations in the context of competitive
situations. A negotiation simulation, (depicted in Appendix A) helps students understand and
think about the nature of negotiation and the impact of decision making. Moreover, the objective
of this classroom exercise is paramount because many of the important phenomena in
negotiation, such as interests, goals and cooperation, are ambiguous, and often do NOT have
right answers or a “one size fits all” solution set.
Thus, as an instructor, we cannot teach a set of formulae that will always maximize profit.
Rather, we must teach students how to manage conflict, make informed decisions, negotiate
meaning between others, cultivate self-awareness, and develop strategies of how to deal with
ambiguity, and how to utilize problem-solving strategies to reduce it. This negotiation simulation
provides students with an experience in the negotiation process, including learning how to
evaluate costs and benefits of alternative actions, improving student analytical abilities in
understanding behavior of individuals and groups, cultivating new confidence in negotiating as
an effective means for resolving conflict in organizations, and instigating how to effectively
manage the negotiating process and corresponding outcomes in today’s business practices.
Students often approach this peer negotiation simulation with enthusiasm, as its’ reputation
among students inspires students to want to “win” and “compete” with their peers, and it is also a
graded simulation. Consequently, pairs of students are chosen based on profile data derived from
student self assessment reports. Students are paired with their “complement”, in an attempt to
match student skills, abilities, strengths and limitations, creating a classroom learning community
that is challenging, competitive and innovative, mimicking real world business environments.
In conclusion, teaching enlightens us by fostering personal growth and professional
development. And, while there is no one size fits all approach to educating future business
managers, for any business school to be truly successful, it must find its own level by engaging
all its stakeholders. In sum, teaching and learning are undoubtedly social arts necessarily
involving relationships between people.
The success of the teacher in the practice of this ancient art depends on the ability to possess a
unique quality. It is an attitude of mind that enables an instructor to make the relationship
between the teacher and his/her students a reciprocal one. In doing so, we recognize that not all
the learning should be done by our students and not all the teaching should be done by the
instructor.
In classroom teaching, creativity and innovation abound. Experiential learning vehicles are
essential. And, experimentation is the word of day, as teachers as well as students are equally
creative researchers of the classroom scene. The classroom becomes a learning community with
shared goals, values and mutual responsibilities dedicated to collective learning and personal
development. The practice of teaching offers opportunities for systematic inquiry and rigorous
reasoning about substantive issues. Academic plans, course syllabi, and classroom processes
become vehicles to truly express creativity and innovation.
In closing, creativity is required of any instructor. In the process of planning for a discussion,
which utilizes supplementary materials in classroom exercises, such as in this negotiation
simulation, shown in Appendix A, one’s understanding of what remains to be discovered about
the substantive issues raised in class, is really the “true lesson”. Teaching enables a forum where
colleagues and students of different disciplines use a variety of pedagogical approaches, discuss
common challenges, and collaborate on providing solutions. Working with eager students
affirms our faith in the worth of teaching as a creative tool of instruction, and its tremendous
contributive potential to shaping the professional lives of future business and industry leaders.
References available upon request from Mary Elizabeth Moran
APPENDIX A
Strategic Negotiation Learning Simulation
SERVICE CONTRACT
SERVICE DELIVERY DATE
Price
Seller’s Cost Savings Table
Number
Cost Savings
Date
Cost Savings
Level
Cost Savings
1
$1200
March 1
0
A
$2000
2
$1050
March 8
$100
B
$1750
3
$900
March 15
$200
C
$1500
4
$750
March 22
$300
D
$1250
5
$600
March 29
$400
E
$1000
6
$450
April 6
$500
F
$750
7
$300
April 13
$600
G
$500
8
0
April 20
$700
H
0
SERVICE CONTRACT
SERVICE DELIVERY DATE
Price
Buyer’s Cost Savings Table
Number
Cost Savings
Date
Cost Savings
Level
Cost Savings
1
0
March 1
$1200
A
0
2
$100
March 8
$1050
B
$250
3
$200
March 15
$900
C
$500
4
$300
March 22
$750
D
$750
5
$400
March 29
$600
E
$1000
6
$500
April 6
$450
F
$1250
7
$600
April 13
$300
G
$1500
8
$700
April 20
0
H
$2000