Thawing the Freeze

Thawing the Salary Freeze Team Discussion

Overall, we agreed Katherine did a great job negotiating with Alisa. She was relentless in the way she “stonewalled” the negotiation as well as creating a challenging environment for Alisa. Katherine did a good job controlling Alisa’s emotions and remained focused on the difficult negotiation.
Katherine created a socio-emotional conflict during the negotiation accusing Alisa of having lack of experience because she was new to the industry. At one point, Katherine even offered up her own pay stub to prove that the company had no extra money to give away and that there was in fact a “salary freeze.”
In the end, Katherine did make concessions, offering employees a percentage of any company bonuses. Whether or not her offer was affected by Alisa’s threat of informing the media of prior bonuses given to company executives is hard to say. However, it appeared that Alisa’s threat to go to the New York Times had no depth. Alisa’s seemed to be an emotional scare tactic due to body language and tone of voice.
We also had one other interesting analysis of the negotiation. We had the impression each of the parties were constantly on the defense. It appeared they did not engage in a problem solving mindset for a successful negotiation. Integrative bargaining did not transpire between Katherine and Alisa until the end. Katherine and Alisa resolved this conflict in a Win-Win situation despite the fact Katherine was arguing for a win-lose situation in her favor. Unfortunately, we fear both parties would find themselves in a similar confrontation in years to