Spring 2013 URSP participant Amani Mansour:
This
semester I am conducting research on the role of personal power on a person’s
success in meetings and negotiations. I
became interested in the role of power in negotiations when I was an intern
last semester for the Undergraduate Experiential Learning Project (UELP). This
project creates experiential learning activities (ELAs) for conflict analysis
and resolution classes. Students
participate in these activities to help them link theory to practice. In two of these ELAs, students take on roles
and participate in meetings and negotiations.
Through my observations last semester, I noticed that power plays a huge
role in the success of the negotiation process.
This is why I am using the ELAs to collect data on the role of personal
power in negotiations.
I am
currently at the stage in my research of attending and collecting data from the
ELAs. To get to this stage, I had to
first narrow the type of power I wanted to focus on. I chose personal power because I felt it is a
huge component to a negotiator’s success but there is very little literature
about it compared to the general concept of power. Then, I defined personal power and broke it
down into components. I relied on the
literature to help me shape the way I defined personal power. For the first month and a half of this
semester, a typical week for me included reading scholarly work on power and
negotiations, meeting with my mentor and discussing what I have found and how
it applies to my research, and from this, my research question evolved to
focusing on personal power. Now a
typical week for me includes meeting with my mentor, attending ELAs and taking
notes, and listening to recordings from previous ELAs and collecting data from
that. The research process has not only
expanded my knowledge on my topic and my field of conflict analysis, but also
on the research process. While
conducting research is a difficult process, it is also a fruitful one; and I am
very excited to continue my work and hopefully have interesting results to
share by the end of the semester.
