Dealing with Difficult People: Comcast and Its Critics

In our lives as business negotiators, there inevitably will be times when we feel angry, frustrated, and mistreated. At such times we face a choice between letting our negative feelings show, concealing them, or trying to channel them into positive change. Ample negotiation research has found that negotiators who show their anger tend to make greater gains than negotiators who seem happy or more neutral—as long as their anger seems genuine rather than contrived. But as we all know, a host of contextual factors affect how others will react to our emotional displays in negotiation, including protocol, power, and our past behavior. And those contextual factors can mean that otherwise good advice doesn’t always apply.