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.

High concern for self, low concern for the other

The dual concerns model, developed by researchers like Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin, explains negotiation styles by crossing two axes: how much you care about your own outcome and how much you care about the other’s. The competitive style scores high on the first and low on the second: it negotiates to win, not to split, and doesn’t avoid tension if it believes its position is correct.

How it shows up day to day

• Defends its position firmly, even when it creates friction.
• Prioritizes the final outcome over keeping harmony in the process.
• Feels comfortable with direct conflict if that’s what it takes to get what it’s after.
• Tends to be effective in urgent, one-off decisions where yielding time also has a cost.

Their growth challenge

This style works very well in one-off, high-stakes negotiations, but it wears down relationships if applied always, especially with people you have to keep dealing with afterward. The growth challenge isn’t defending self-interest less, it’s learning to tell when the relationship matters as much as the outcome, and saving this style for when it’s really needed.

What Carnegie says about winning an argument

Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), raises an uncomfortable idea for this style: you can’t really win an argument. Even when you prove your point with solid arguments and the other person admits you’re right, you usually end up with the relationship damaged, because nobody enjoys feeling defeated, publicly or privately. Carnegie doesn’t say yielding is always the right answer, he says you have to be aware of the real price of insisting on being right: you can walk away from a conversation with the outcome you wanted and, at the same time, have lost some trust or closeness with the other person without even realizing it.

This doesn’t invalidate the competitive style. There are decisions where the outcome matters far more than the relationship, especially if it’s a one-off or high-stakes situation, and there defending your position firmly is the right call. Carnegie’s point matters for the opposite case: negotiations where you’re going to keep dealing with the other person afterward, where winning the specific point can end up costing you if it erodes a relationship you need to maintain. Telling the two scenarios apart, before deciding how hard to fight for a position, is the part this style tends to overlook.

On the map of styles

At the opposite end is the accommodating negotiator, who prioritizes the relationship over the outcome. The collaborative negotiator tries to have both concerns, its own and the other’s, covered at once.

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