Sometimes negotiation is a private affair between two parties. At other times, however, there are audiences to a negotiation, and the presence of an audience has both a subtle and a direct impact on negotiations.

Three types of audiences may be encountered. First, when teams of people (rather than individuals) negotiate, the chief negotiators provide much of the actual dialogue. Although these two usually speak directly to one another, they also use their own and opposing team members as an audience. We address these dynamics extensively in the next chapter.

A second type of audience is the constituency the negotiator represents. A husband or wife negotiating for a new house represents a family, division heads on a companywide budget committee negotiate what portion of capital resources their departments will have for the coming year, sales or purchasing people negotiate for their companies, and diplomats negotiate for their countries. The audiences in each case have a stake in the outcome of the negotiation and benefit or suffer according to the skills of their representatives.

The third type of audience is bystanders. Bystanders see or hear about the negotiations and form favorable or unfavorable opinions of the settlement and the parties involved. Bystanders may or may not be indirectly affected by the course and outcome of the negotiations.

Audiences influence negotiators through two different routes. One is that negotiators desire positive evaluations from those who are in a position to observe what they have done. The other is that audiences hold negotiators responsible for the outcomes of negotiations. They can reward negotiators by publicly praising them and punish negotiators by firing them. They can intrude and change the course of negotiations—as when the public requires mandatory arbitration or fact-finding in some disputes. They make their preferences known—for example, by talking to the press—thereby putting pressure on one or both negotiators through the impact of public opinion and support.

Audiences can have both favorable and unfavorable effects on negotiations. Sometimes negotiators try to use an audience to their advantage, as when they try to pressure the other party into taking a more flexible or desirable position; they may also try to prevent an audience from having influence when they think it might be undesirable for their position. Although there are many different ways of influencing an audience, all involve controlling the visibility or communication with that audience. In this section, we suggested four basic strategies to influence audience effects:

1. Limit concessions by making actions visible to one's constituency, thereby putting oneself in a position that the other party will recognize as difficult to change.
2. Increase the possibility of concessions on the part of both sides by cutting off the visibility of negotiations from the audiences.
3. Communicate indirectly with the other negotiator by communicating with his or her audiences.
4. Facilitate building a relationship with the other negotiator by reducing visibility and communication with both parties' audiences.

Finally, we offered suggestions for constituents that they can use to manage their agents in negotiation. These include processes for managing agent authority, helping the agent understand the constituent's primary interests and alternatives, giving the agent discretion to manage the process, and establishing the process for frequent reporting between agents and constituents.

When negotiations move from a private to a public context, they become more complex and more formal. In setting strategy, a negotiator needs to consider whether negotiations should be held privately or involve audiences in various ways. To ignore this social context is to ignore a potent factor in determining negotiation outcomes.