A Study of Principled Negotiation Based on Transactional Analysis Theory

Negotiation, Businessmen, Agreement.


The concept of “principled negotiation”, developed by Fisher and Ury in “Getting to Yes”, is one of the most influential approaches in current negotiation theory.

However, it is important to recognize three critical academic issues aboutprincipled negotiation. (1) Why principled negotiation and positional bargaining (the method of principled negotiation is contrasted with hard and soft positional bargaining.) emerge, (2) how to deal with principled negotiation in reality and（3）how to make a principled negotiation with theoretical support.

This paper is written to study those problems by applying psychological theory of Transactional Analysis (TA). According to negotiation mechanism analysis based on TA, this paper is set up a new SESCO model (Situation -Ego- Strokes strategy –Complementary transaction – Objective) on negotiation. Firstly, identify the ego state both oneself and others in a specific negotiation situation. Secondly, meet needs with each other by exchange of strokes. Thirdly, adopt complementary transaction to get win-win objective.

Shougang Zhang, Milan Constantinovits