Chapter 6 EN Finding and Using Negotiation Leverage

There are three major sources of leverage: information and expertise, control over resources, structural position, and the location within an organizational structure (which leads to either formal authority or informal power based on where one is located relative to flows of information or resources). Imbalances in these power sources across the table are inevitable, but effective negotiators can take steps to alter the power dynamics before and during negotiation.

By leverage, we mean the process of gaining or using various sources of power in order to obtain and use temporary advantage over the other negotiating party.

Kolb and Williams identify three strategic levers available to help people navigate the shadow negotiation:
Power Moves
Process Moves
Appreciative Moves

Negotiators may also want to alter party’s beliefs about the importance of his own objectives and convince him that his concessions are not as valuable as he first believed. Negotiators may portray themselves as likable people who should be treated decently. All these efforts are designed to use information, as well as the qualities of the sender and receiver of that information, to adjust the party’s position, perceptions, and opinions; we call this group of tactics influence.


Influence is based on an approach developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo that suggest that there are two general paths by which people are persuaded . The first path occurs consciously and involves integration of the message into the individual’s previously existing cognitive structures (thoughts, intellectual, frameworks, etc.)

In order to examine a very large number of influence (leverage) tools that one could use in negotiation, these tools were considered in two broad categories: influence that occurs through the central route to persuasion, and influence that occurs through the peripheral route to persuasion.

Our discussion of peripheral routes to influence will consider three sets of strategies: message aspects, attributes of the persuader, and elements of the influence context.

Facts and ideas are clearly important in changing another person’s opinions and perceptions, but the effectiveness of a persuasion effort depends on how the facts and ideas are selected, organized, and presented. There are three major issues to consider when constructing a message: the content of the message (the facts and topics that should be covered), structure of the message (how the topics and facts should be arranged and organized), and the delivery style (how the message should be presented).

We consider how the receiver—the target of influence—either can shape and direct what the sender is communicating, or can intellectually resist the persuasive effects of the message. Effective negotiators are skilled not only at crafting persuasive messages, but also at playing the role of skilled “consumers” of the messages that others direct their way.