In order to co-ordinate multiple resource providers in grid environment to meet a common objective, support for negotiation is needed to establish a contract between the user and the resource providers that clearly states the QoS required, restrictions on resource utilization and penalties during violation of the objective. Strength of the negotiation process mainly depends on the selection of resources for negotiation. Currently, no grid meta scheduler supports SLA negotiation. We propose a deviation based resource ordering algorithm (DRS) that orders and selects the resources for negotiation based on their deviation value computed from the parameters in the job request against their current availability in the resources. Also, we propose mutual agreement protocol (MAP) to negotiate with resources in order to get their commitment against the job request. We simulate this negotiation process and compare it against gridway meta scheduler that shows improved performance in terms of average SLA creation time, success rate and throughput. © 2008 IEEE.