Conflict Management and Negotiation

This course aims at offering students both theoretical and methodological tools to understand and manage conflict dynamics and negotiation. The course will begin with the inevitability of conflict and its detrimental effect on people, relations, teams, and organizations, to pave the way towards the need to become "conflict management competent".
The first learning objective is to enhance individual conflict management competence. A conflict management competence involves developing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral skills that enable you to manage your own emotions, clarify what is happening in the situation, and engage constructively with the other person to find solutions to issues arising from the conflict.
The second learning objective is to recognize the most common biases, both cognitive and motivational, that can trap negotiators and find and adopt strategies to cope with them.
The third consists of developing a theoretical and methodological framework that participants can use to analyze, prepare for, and execute most negotiations they might encounter. Participants will build a kind of toolkit of principles, strategies, and tactics to execute each stage of the negotiation process to the final agreement.

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

1.Understand the sources and the stages of the conflict process.
2.Recognize the differences between emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects in conflict management.
3.Assess both party's BATNA and evaluate the ZOPA.
4.Recognize the most common negotiator mistakes.
5.Recognize and find ways to overcome the most common biases (cognitive and motivational).
6.Recognize and develop strategies of influence in given situations.