Skills and Negotiation Behavior of Croatian Businessmen

The purpose of this research was to get an insight into the skills and negotiation behaviour of businessmen in Croatia and to look closely at the factors that affect the negotiation process adversely. Cognitive ability, social and emotional intelligence were chosen as the features that determine the level of negotiation abilities. Often business negotiators encounter obstacles arising from their nature ; limitations and negotiating abilities ; insufficiently developed emotional and social intelligence and negotiator’s biases result in making non-objective and poor in the settlement of conflict. Furthermore, the aim was to detect the level of businessmen’s self- consciousness and self-esteem in negotiation situations in order to detect possible discrepancies when compared to the level of their skills. The quantitative research was conducted on a sample of 80 businessmen in Croatia with the intention to examine the perceptions about their own negotiating skills. The sample consists of highly educated individuals who own small and medium size entrepreneurship and the ones that are employed in companies at the positions that entitle frequent negotiation. The research has shown that Croatian businessmen do not have sufficiently developed emotional and social intelligence in the context of negotiation process but at the same time consider themselves to be successful negotiators with developed negotiation skills. The paper provides useful insight into the perception of businessmen’s skills and abilities in negotiation processes which deserves further research attention.