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Negotiations are an essential part of all professional activity, and for French town planners there are particular benefits that can be achieved by more effective performance in negotiating. However, teaching the skills to operate in a discretionary system is not common in the initial education of town planners. This paper aims to set out the author’s ideas and illustrate how this approach is grounded in theory and related to planning practice.

The subject of negotiating skills is set within the context of implementation studies and the paper focuses on the concept of integrated bargaining as the appropriate approach. The research consisted of the observation of student negotiating in role‐play exercises.

The effectiveness of the inclusion of negotiation skills in the curriculum has not been systematically measured, but anecdotal support from former students is strong. In addition, those students frequently offered the training course as practitioners as their careers progress often express a realization of the importance of greater awareness and skills in this area. Finally, it is evident that the professionals' value negotiation training, as this short course is the one most frequently runs in over six years of experience and one of those most frequently.

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is now rising up the agenda of the legal profession in France and in Europe. The message seems clear to us: whether one's interest is in implementation or simply dispute resolution, planning students and practitioners should be equipped with the knowledge, understanding and skills of negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is to present and test a conceptual framework, where relationship quality is: directly affected by both the conflict management approach used and the type of conflict found within the relationship, and enhanced or diminished by conflict management approach's moderating affect on the impact of type of conflict on relationship quality.

The unit of analysis for this study was purchasing retailers who interact with industrial salespeople. Data used for this research were collected through interview questionnaire surveys aimed at the French retailers association during February 2009. A total of 320 French retailers were sampled to fill out the questionnaire. A total of 131 retailers completed and returned the survey for a response rate of 41 percent. The measures were developed and analyzed using the two‐step approach recommended by Gerbing and Anderson with LISREL 8.3.

This study finds that functional conflict positively affects the quality of the retailer‐supplier relationship and this effect is amplified when retailers use a collaboration conflict management approach. However, the positive effects of functional conflict are mitigated by retailers engaging in accommodating and compromising approaches. Dysfunctional conflict did not positively or negatively affect the overall relationship quality in this study. Its management determines whether it will have a positive or negative effect on relationship quality.

While the results presented here in general support the basic premises of the research, several limitations must be noted and there are several areas of future research that could be conducted using the current data set. First, an identical instrument could be administered to a sample of suppliers. This change might give some indication of the differences in suppliers' and retailers' perceptions of conflict management strategies and their effects on relationship quality. Another relevant addition to the understanding in the retailer/supplier arena might include the effect of teams instead of individual retailers on manifest conflict and relationship quality.

The survey results provide new insights on how retailers can use conflict management behaviors to cope better with functional and dysfunctional conflict and improve relationship quality with suppliers.