ABSTRACT
Business negotiation is an important managerial act, which may require intensive home work on the cultural interventions that can play a decisive role in the win or loss of an important business deal. Negotiation itself is a vast arena of managerial study since it presents a situation of stressful communication. Once the layer of cultural variation gets added to this complicated deal-making act it may lead to a plethora of problems. Hence while negotiating with other culture business parties, it is extremely important to know their culture as it can help in planning the moves and countermoves to make the negotiation progress smoothly. This chapter discusses the cultural differences that hallmark various approaches to the process of negotiation. The chapter covers negotiation processes like team memberships, pre-negotiation talks, agenda adoptions and adherence, data presentation patterns, assessment metrics to gauge negotiation progression, expectations for negotiation outcomes – zero-sum competitive or win–win cooperative targets, culturally tweaked negotiation stylizations, time behaviors, and concession and bargain patterning. The chapter also discusses how cultural variables like uncertainty avoidance index and short-term versus long-term orientations, etc. may further complicate the negotiation targets. Cultural differences also lead to differential expectations when it comes to contract construction and post-contractual flexibility. This chapter also discusses the presentation of conflict management, which forms an integral part of all intercultural negotiation encounters, exacerbated by value dissimilarities for culturally compatible resolutions.
