Negotiation styles of Sri Lankan project managers in dealing with client and consultant organizations

Abstract

The nature of construction industry contributes to the germination and manifestation of construction disputes. Negotiation is often the first attempt in getting dispute resolved. Inefficient negotiation discourages early settlement and contracting environment becomes adversarial, thus rendering the use of expensive arbitration or litigation. One of the reasons for such inefficiency is due to the lack of understanding of the styles adopted during their own negotiation processes. This study aims at identifying mostly used negotiation styles by Sri Lankan project managers during construction stage of projects. Changes of relative usages of negotiation styles when dealing with Client and Consultant organisations were also studied. Rahim Organisational Conflict Inventory – II was used to measure the negotiation styles of project managers. Statistical analysis techniques were used to identify significantly changed negotiation styles. The study revealed that Integrating style is the most preferred negotiation style when dealing with both Client and Consultant organizations by the Sri Lankan project managers during the construction stage of projects. The usage of Obliging style by project managers showed a statistically significant reduction when dealing with Client than Consultant organizations, while the Integrating style showed a substantial increase though it was not statistically significant at 5% significance level. Client and Consultant organisations were suggested to use Integrating negotiation style when entering to negotiation since there is a high possibility to resolve conflict through negotiation when both parties use Integrating style.