Sometimes you don’t have much of a choice as to when your business negotiation takes place. Perhaps someone is flying in from another country or you are working around a busy schedule. But if you have a choice, do you prefer to negotiate in the morning or the afternoon?

As is well known, there are morning people and night people (also known as a chronotype). Morning people tend to get up earlier, be more productive and more chipper first thing, and night people get up later and are more active later in the day. New research has recently come out indicating that morning people may actually have increased advantages in life, and specifically in business.

Inc. Magazine reports the following:

“Early birds are more proactive than evening people – and so they do well in business, says Christoph Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany.”

Read the Inc. Magazine article here: http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/07/research-says-morning-people-are-more-proactive.html

Randler was also interviewed by the Harvard Business Review. He was asked if you can change your evening versus morning tendencies. Here is his response:

…duration of sleep has nothing to do with the increased proactivity and morning alertness that we see among morning people. But while the number of hours of sleep doesn’t matter, the timing of sleep does. So you could try shifting your daily cycle by going to bed earlier. Another thing you could do is go outside into the daylight early in the morning. The daylight resets your circadian clock and helps shift you toward morningness. If you go outside only in the evening, you tend to shift toward eveningness.

Read the entire article here: http://hbr.org/2010/07/defend-your-research-the-early-bird-really-does-get-the-worm/ar/1

The bottom line is that the corporate world is biased toward morning performance, meaning also that negotiators are likely to do better if they are morning people. Does this mean that negotiations should be in the morning? It probably depends on your team, and their chronotypes.