Competitive Negotiator: Prioritizing Your Own Outcome

The competitive negotiator style prioritizes its own outcome: it defends its position firmly, even at the cost of some tension. Negotiation research calls it a contending strategy, pressing so that the other side is the one who gives way, and it is the most studied of them all.

High concern for self, low concern for the other

Dual concern theory, in its best-known version by Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin (1986), explains negotiation strategies by crossing two axes: how much you care about your own outcome and how much you care about the other side’s. The idea goes back to Blake and Mouton’s managerial grid (1964), and the five-style map our quiz uses closely resembles the one in the Thomas-Kilmann instrument (1974).

The competitive style scores high on the first axis and low on the second: it negotiates to win, not to share, and it doesn’t shy away from tension if it believes its position is the right one.

Firmness, anchors, and slow concessions

In practice, this style is usually recognizable by a handful of behaviors:

• Defends its position firmly, even when that creates friction.
• Opens with high demands and concedes slowly, in small steps.
• Is comfortable with direct conflict if that’s what it takes to get what it wants.
• Tends to be effective in urgent decisions, where giving up time also has a cost.

An everyday example: buying a used car from a private seller. The competitive person arrives with the prices of several comparable listings, makes the first offer, comes down little by little, and is ready to walk away if the number doesn’t work. It’s a one-off negotiation over a single issue, the price, and that’s where this style performs well.

What the studies show

Firmness has empirical support in one specific area: distributive negotiations, where whatever one side gains, the other loses.

• The first offer carries weight. In three experiments by Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler (2001), the side that made the first offer, buyer or seller, got a better outcome on average, and that offer strongly predicted the final price. The effect vanished when the other side thought about its own target or about the opponent’s alternatives. We go into more detail in the article on how to negotiate your salary.
• But it leaves value on the table when there are several issues. In the meta-analysis by De Dreu, Weingart, and Kwon (2000), covering 28 studies, negotiators with a selfish motive were more contentious, searched less for joint solutions, and reached worse joint agreements than those with a prosocial motive, provided the latter also resisted yielding.
• The pie looks fixed. Leigh Thompson and Reid Hastie (1990) observed that many negotiators start by assuming their interests are opposed on everything. That “fixed-pie perception” fits naturally with the competitive style, and it’s what keeps people from seeing the issues on which both sides could gain at the same time.

The conclusion of this line of research isn’t that competing is a mistake, but that how well it performs depends on the kind of negotiation: very well when there’s a single issue and no tomorrow, less well when there are several issues and an ongoing relationship.

The price of winning the argument

Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), a popular classic rather than a study, puts it in a sentence that’s uncomfortable for this style: you can’t win an argument. Even if you prove your point, the other person is usually left feeling defeated, and the relationship feels it.

It’s the same logic as escalating retaliation, which we analyze in the article on an eye for an eye: when both sides keep dealing with each other afterward, each one-off victory can open a cycle of “well, then neither will I.”

That’s why the trait that most distinguishes an effective competitor is knowing when the relationship matters as much as the outcome: with a stranger in a one-time purchase, firmness comes cheap; with a business partner, a teammate, or a regular client, it can be expensive.

On the map of styles

At the opposite end is the accommodating negotiator, who prioritizes the relationship over the outcome. The collaborative negotiator shares this style’s defense of self-interest but adds concern for the other side, and research shows that this combination produces the best joint agreements when several issues are at stake.

Want to see your own style? Take the negotiation style quiz.

Sources

• Blake, R. R., and Mouton, J. S. (1964). The Managerial Grid. Gulf Publishing.
• Carnegie, D. (1936). How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster.
• De Dreu, C. K. W., Weingart, L. R., and Kwon, S. (2000). Influence of social motives on integrative negotiation: A meta-analytic review and test of two theories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(5), 889-905. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.5.889
• Galinsky, A. D., and Mussweiler, T. (2001). First offers as anchors: The role of perspective-taking and negotiator focus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 657-669. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.657
• Pruitt, D. G., and Rubin, J. Z. (1986). Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement. Random House.
• Thomas, K. W., and Kilmann, R. H. (1974). Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. Xicom.
• Thompson, L., and Hastie, R. (1990). Social perception in negotiation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 47(1), 98-123. doi:10.1016/0749-5978(90)90048-E