Collaborative Role‐Play Design: Teaching Negotiation through a Novel Student–Business Partnership

How to best use role plays is a recurring theme in the negotiation pedagogy literature. Simulations are omnipresent in negotiation course syllabi, but scholars have often questioned how to best utilize them. Authors have noted the drawbacks inherent to their use, including the recreational and often artificial contexts they are set in (in other words, students perceive them as “only games”), both of which are likely to have negative effects on the participants' real degree of commitment (Alexander and LeBaron 2009). Recent research has focused on how to remedy this gap between pedagogical simulation and the negotiations that students are likely to encounter in the real world (Poitras, Stimec, and Hill 2013). One suggested solution is to encourage students to create their own role plays (Druckman and Ebner 2013, 2018; see also Cherryholmes 1966).

We carried out an innovative pedagogical experiment during the 2015 to 2016 academic year involving two groups of students in the master's degree program of a leading French business school. We sought to explore how to increase the verisimilitude of simulations as well as students' commitment to the process and improve their ultimate pedagogical effectiveness. As a part of this experiment, students devised the role‐plays themselves, deriving inspiration from real situations that some of them had experienced in companies in which they had completed internships.

In addition, we also received supplemental information about current complex negotiations from six of the companies where these students were employed to help the students construct case studies for use within role‐play sessions, with the goals of enhancing the realism of the simulation itself and providing additional useful background information. Finally, we used qualitative data, including participatory observation, role‐play debriefing, student focus groups, and student performance assessment to analyze the effectiveness of this innovation.

Following a fairly comprehensive review of the literature (Usunier 2004; Alexander and LeBaron 2009; Zartman 2010; Poitras, Stimec, and Hill 2013), Daniel Druckman and Noam Ebner (2013: 67) concluded that: “role‐plays are useful for motivating students but there is no proof of their effectiveness.” The role play's most significant weakness, according to critics, is its artificiality (Alexander and LeBaron 2009).

Rather than eliminating simulations from the negotiation classroom (with no other tool in sight to replace them), authors have argued that they can be improved. One approach is to make them more realistic; another is to involve students in their creation. Roger Volkema sought to enhance realism (2007) by designing a simulation involving real monetary awards. Students reported that this innovation did enhance realism as well as their motivation to take the simulation seriously, but Volkema did not test whether it improved their acquisition of negotiation concepts.

William Zartman has also noted the limitations imposed by simulations' artificial nature. “The best simulation,” he wrote (2010: 235), “is one where parties play themselves for real stakes in real time in real scenarios.” He recommended that role‐plays simulate ordinary, everyday scenarios that are culturally and contextually neutral, thus enabling students to more easily inhabit the roles.¹

Nadja Alexander and Michelle LeBaron (2009) have cited the lack of authenticity in role‐play scenarios and recommended “adventure learning” as an alternative. Adventure learning involves taking students on outings to negotiate in real situations that directly affect them, such as a negotiation revolving around lunch in which students who negotiate poorly, in Alexander and LeBaron's words (2009: 186), will “eat poorly.”

Melissa Manwaring, Barbara McAdoo, and Sandra Cheldelin (2010) took Alexander and LeBaron's (2009) experiment a step further by comparing a group of students engaged in real‐life negotiations in the Istanbul Bazaar in Turkey with another group of students negotiating outside the classroom in the Greater Washington, D.C. area. The authors concluded that these “adventure experiences can offer powerful learning opportunities for negotiation students” and “can effectively supplement – if not necessarily replace – more traditional role‐play exercises” (Manwaring, McAdoo, and Cheldelin 2010: 145).

Teachers in other fields of study have shared the same concern for improving learning outcomes by placing students in realistic situations. Thus, Niclas Andersson and Pernille Hammar Andersson (2010) designed simulations that involved both engineering students and industry professionals, which allowed the students to gain hands‐on experience and acquire technical skills more readily. The authors noted that it can be difficult for teachers to assess professional skills and suggested that a possible solution would be to invite professionals to participate in the assessment (Andersson and Andersson 2010).

Implementing innovations such as the ones described above can entail particular difficulties even when they do succeed in reducing the artificiality of the simulation. For example, Volkema suggested that negotiating for money in a classroom may not be ethical because it can create an unfair competition between students and can also be seen as gambling (Volkema 2007), while Manwaring, McAdoo, and Cheldelin (2010) noted that locating such ideal negotiating environments as the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul may not be easy for most instructors.

Noam Ebner and Yael Efron (2005: 381) expressed skepticism about the pedagogical benefits of “simulating real life situations based on real facts.” They argued that, in such scenarios, students have preconceptions based on their own exposure to the simulated conflict and lack critical distance, which limits their ability to acquire negotiation skills from the simulation (Ebner and Efron 2005). They propose instead an approach they call “pseudo‐reality,” which involves designing a negotiation and/or mediation simulation based on real facts and recent events to be enacted by students who haven't personally experienced them. This, they write, “can help students overcome strong preconceptions or biases that can interfere with the learning process while at the same time preserving the advantages of working within a familiar, realistic environment” (Ebner and Efron 2005: 377).

Although some authors have focused on improving how simulations are constructed (Poitras, Stimec, and Hill 2013), others have recommended that students should invent their own (Cherryholmes 1966; Alexander and LeBaron 2009; Druckman and Ebner 2013). Druckman and Ebner (2013) sought to improve concept learning by implementing a project in which students created their own simulations, which were then enacted by other students. Students wrote the role plays to emphasize negotiation concepts they had already learned about in class (e.g., alternatives, time pressure, and power). The authors reported that “students grasp the relationships between different concepts better when they create the simulations than when they enact them” (Druckman and Ebner 2013: 81). The authors concluded that their results supported their contention that “A fresh look at whether, when and how to employ simulations is clearly needed” (Druckman and Ebner 2013: 87).

More recently, Druckman and Ebner (2018) compared the pedagogical effectiveness of a theoretical lecture, a case analysis, and a role‐play design. They concluded that, of the three, role‐play design was the most efficient method for learning and assimilating concepts. Their work, as well as the work of other researchers who have to sought new ways to enhance negotiation learning using simulation, inspired the design of our study.

In this pedagogical experiment, we assigned students to design role‐plays based upon six real‐life complex negotiation situations. Each student both helped create a simulation and then each student played in a simulation designed by another group of students and also evaluated his or her fellow students' performances for the role play they had themselves helped to create.

Eighty students participated in this project. All were enrolled in an advanced negotiation course as part of a master of business administration program at a French business college. The course took place over three half‐day and one full‐day sessions spread out over one semester, divided into two main phases: preparation and execution. During the last session, we devoted two hours to collectively evaluating the results.

The stages of the project are diagrammed in Figure One.

We carried out this project with students enrolled in the master's management program. All were enrolled in one of two negotiation theory courses that focused in particular on the work of Richard Walton and Robert McKersie (1965). By asking the students to write simulations based on real management experience, we hoped to fulfill several pedagogical objectives:

• illuminate both the distributive and integrative potential of a negotiation;

• give students the opportunity to identify and evaluate the parties' best alternatives to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) as well as the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) and how to secure the best possible outcome inside this zone;

• give students the opportunity to explore and discover potential cooperation areas, (i.e., the integrative potential of the negotiation); and

• show students how the power balance among parties can be affected by how they share knowledge.

The first step in our preparation phase was to contact (via telephone and e‐mail) all the companies where our students were working as interns and ask them to participate in the project. Six of them answered affirmatively. The two professors running the project then met each internship supervisor to select examples of real negotiations that each company had been involved in. We chose six scenarios based on how typical and representative they were of the ordinary problems faced by management.

During these individual meetings, we asked the students' internship supervisors to provide us with background information about each scenario selected (the contract, the sums involved, the general sales terms, the arguments used by each side, etc.), which would allow the students themselves to construct the case studies. We then compiled dossiers and gave them to the students to allow them to choose the case study they wished to work on, in groups of four.

Some of the scenarios were more complex than others. If the students found the context and issues at stake too complex, they were encouraged to contact the professional supervisors for additional explanation.

The six firms involved in this project represent a variety of sectors. All the simulation scenarios involved business‐to‐business negotiations. Specifically, the negotiations involved:

• a supply contract between an aeronautics manufacturer and a vendor supplying engine test stands;

• a dispute between the information technology department of a financial group and an under‐performing supplier;

• a disagreement between the sales and production departments of an automobile manufacturing firm;

• disputes between a rental car firm and two of its corporate customers; and

• a deal between a large food provider and the purchasing department of a major retail chain.

We asked each group of four students to produce the following:

• a three‐page background report including all details known to both parties (i.e., stakes and objectives) and describing the simulation in precise detail (the place, length, roles, and issues);

• two one‐to‐two‐page role cards providing specific information about each negotiator, including details unknown to his or her counterpart, that is, goals, vested interests, likely arguments, and BATNAs; and

• an instructor's manual explaining the pedagogical objectives of the simulation, specifically identifying the ZOPA the students had designed and how they expected their fellow students to perform within those limits, as well as the simulation's specific integrative opportunities.

We asked the students to use the information provided by the companies to create their role plays, but we did allow them to invent additional factors or elements to enhance the balance between the distributive and integrative dimensions. For example, they were allowed to modify the quantitative data and to alter the ZOPA to shape a specific dynamic for the negotiation. We acknowledge that these additions somewhat reduce the realism of the simulations, but we believe they were necessary to highlight the specific concepts we were trying to teach, such as how to make a deal within the ZOPA.

Teachers read and offered feedback on each successive version of the simulations, which students incorporated into the final versions. All students participated, not in the role play they had created but in one of those devised by a different group. We formed evaluation panels to grade student performance in the simulations and provide on‐the‐spot feedback. Each panel comprised a participating intern supervisor, a teacher, and the group of students who had created the role play. Students were graded on the following criteria (see Appendix  One):

• understanding of their counterparts' goals;

• ability to develop arguments;

• understanding of the distributive dimension of the negotiation (i.e., ability to defend one's interests, correct use of credible threats);

• understanding of the integrative dimension of the negotiation (ability to take advantage of available scope for cooperation); and

• display of interactive skills such as empathy.

We set up focus groups containing ten students, offering them the chance to reflect on and express their overall feelings about the project, which difficulties they encountered, how they rated their own contribution, what skills they learned, and their suggestions for ways to improve the process.

Our goal for this project was to investigate whether a simulation that involved students directly in the process of creating it based on real‐life business situations that included the participation of non‐academic professionals would improve key negotiation skills and understanding of negotiation concepts.

We divided the eighty students (forty in each class) into eight focus groups at the end of the final session of the course. Each focus group discussion lasted forty‐five minutes. We asked five open questions:

• What was their overall impression of the project?

• What did they gain from creating the simulations themselves?

• What did they gain from enacting the simulations devised by their fellow students?

• What did they learn about their own case studies from observing their fellow students performing them?

• How did this practical experience illuminate the concepts that they had previously studied in the course?

We recorded and transcribed these discussions and translated the transcripts into English. In these discussions, students revealed a strong degree of commitment to the project. We include here several representative quotes from these translated transcripts that reflect the responses of the majority of the participants. (For a detailed description of the focus group discussion content, see Appendix  Two.)

In the focus group discussions, students stressed that they enjoyed simulations as an element of negotiation training. They also told us that they considered role plays to be valuable career‐training tools and that they found this particular exercise to be even more relevant because the simulations were drawn from real situations and created with the input of professionals. One student told us:

The students also cited the novelty of the approach:

The students also reported that they found the exercise challenging but believed it would improve their skills.

Some students also cited the value of working closely with the outside professionals. One student told us:

Students also found the experience of evaluating their classmates to be uniquely useful. One student told us:

The students told us that the greatest challenge this exercise created for them was incorporating conceptual elements (i.e., balancing the distributive and integrative dimensions and highlighting the role of information knowledge and asymmetry) into the simulation design. We found it necessary to assist the students in the creation of the case studies and even had to help them to revise successive versions to enhance the pedagogical value with regard to negotiation concepts.

For example, the students who developed a particular case description as well as the professional supervisors working with them realized how tricky it was to manage many of that case's issues. In that case, an IT department manager sought to address problems with sub‐contractor work quality by recruiting more experienced and competent staff, which would have involved paying higher salaries, and the students found weighing these costs against less concrete and measurable gains to be a challenge. This rather complex case enabled our students to improve their skills in identifying the ZOPA, taking into account the financial penalties and the extra cost involved in hiring more experienced consultants.

Highlighting the difficulty of managing the conceptual aspects, one student told us:

Students also told us the exercise sharpened their understanding of integrative and distributive concepts:

One student made a particularly noteworthy observation: that the students seemed inclined to favor integrative options at the expense of their own distributive gains. That student told us:

By its very nature, the exercise was designed to highlight the key role of information asymmetry in bargaining, but the students found getting the information balance just right in their simulation design to be an instructive challenge. One student told us:

Another student noted specifically how this exercise offered insight into the importance of information asymmetry:

The student response to this exercise as well as the direct observations of the faculty and outside professionals suggest that it successfully fulfilled our goal of enhancing both concept and skills learning in a master's level negotiation course. By exposing students to the mechanics of each negotiation scenario, it helped them assimilate several different kinds of negotiation knowledge including how to properly use information within the negotiation context, the challenges of balancing distributive and integrative elements, and what the process of value creation entails. The student responses also indicate that this process generated interest, enthusiasm, and a strong commitment to learn from the process.

We do note several limitations of this project as well as several questions:

• Size and length: Were the groups the optimal size? Were the sessions long enough for students to grasp all the factors involved and give them enough freedom to imagine different scenarios? An additional session would have enabled the students to have a better understanding of the stakes of the negotiation and to have been more precise in writing the role‐plays.

• Distributive elements: Students proved to be more oriented toward integrative options and less likely to claim value than we think negotiators in the real world would be. Hence, future enhancements might involve communicating more explicitly that willingness to cooperate does not preclude firmness in the defense of each party's own interest.

• Feedback: Students told us they desired greater feedback from faculty, which could be addressed by adding more time for evaluation after each role play.

• Outside evaluators: The evaluations were moderated by the teachers. To improve the objectivity of the process, it could be preferable to call upon neutral observers, such as graduates of the program, other faculty colleagues, and other outside professionals.

• Empirical validity: When we compared final grades in these two classes with previous negotiation classes, we identified noticeable improvement, which we believe supports our contention that this exercise promoted concept learning. Implementing a controlled study comparing the performance of one class that used this approach with a different section of the same class that did not could further confirm the effectiveness of this curricular innovation.

More than one hundred years ago, philosopher John Dewey (1916) argued for the educational benefits of adapting lessons from real life, or what is now known as “hands‐on learning.” We believe the simulation exercise that we have described in this article supports this notion. By designing a negotiation simulation from a real‐life problem and working closely with outside professionals, our students gained significant insight into how the concepts and skills we exposed them to in the classroom can play out in the real world.

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