How Croatian managers negotiate : investigating the relationship between managers' personal characteristics and negotiation tactics

Negotiating skills are among the most important skills in managing organizational challenges in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environments. Although the negotiation process has been a challenging area of research, it often fails to take into account the use of certain kinds of tactics during the negotiation process. In that context, the paper aims to explore the relationship between the negotiators' personal characteristics and the negotiation tactics that they employ. An additional aim is to define the potential connection between the negotiators' personal characteristics and the decision to start negotiating without a predefined negotiation tactic. In the context of personal characteristics, gender, age, company size, hierarchical level, experience, and negotiation frequency are examined. As regards negotiation tactics, the red herring tactic, take it or leave it, final offer, limited budget, and emotional negotiation tactic are addressed. The paper contributes to the existing literature by providing new insights into the negotiation behaviour of Croatian managers. In addition, it can serve as a basis for conducting future empirical research in the field of business negotiations.