Culture and Negotiation Strategy: A Framework for Future Research
Jeanne M. Brett
Northwestern University
Abstract
The literature on the use and effectiveness of negotiation strategies reveals intriguing yet unexplained patterns of cultural differences. Negotiators in some regions of the world rely on the questions and answers (Q&A) strategy, typically associated with high trust and high joint gains, while negotiators in other regions of the world rely on the substantiation and offers (S&O) strategy, typically associated with low trust and low joint gains. Yet, negotiators from some low-trust cultures use Q&A; negotiators from some high-trust cultures use S&O; and negotiators from some cultures achieve low joint gains through Q&A or high joint gains through S&O. To explain these anomalies, we propose an integrated framework involving three constructs from cultural psychology: cultural levels of trust, tightness-looseness, and holistic versus analytic mindset. Specifically, we propose that the interaction between trust and tightness-looseness can explain cultural differences in the use of negotiation strategies, while the interaction of these strategies with holistic versus analytic mindset can explain cultural differences in the effectiveness of negotiation strategies. In sum, we extend beyond the boundaries of current research to develop a cultural rationale for anomalies in extant research, encouraging negotiation and management researchers to consider new constructs as their research “goes global.”
Keywords: culture, negotiation strategy, trust, tightness-looseness, holistic versus analytic mindset
The global economy rests on a bedrock of negotiation, with global deal making hitting an all-time peak of $4.2 trillion in 2015 (Hammond, 2015). Whenever interdependent parties interact to work out the terms of their relationship—whether they represent themselves, their businesses, their governments, or some other institution—they are negotiating.
Negotiation scholarship dating from Herodotus to a plethora of recent empirical articles documents national cultural differences in: (1) the strategies negotiators use and (2) the effectiveness of those strategies for creating value (for a review: Gunia, Brett, & Gelfand, 2016). This research generally reveals that negotiators in different cultures systematically use different strategies, but that the strategies that create value in one culture may not do so in another.
Two constraints hinder an understanding of the reasons for these cultural differences in negotiation strategy and outcomes. One is the plethora of cultural constructs used for explanation of cultural differences in negotiation—individualism versus collectivism, high context versus low context communication, hierarchical versus egalitarian social structure, and relational versus transactional motivational orientation, to name just a few (see Lügger, Geiger, Neun, & Backhaus, 2015 for a review). The second, and far more limiting, constraint is the absence of a theoretically grounded framework, providing an integrated explanation for patterns of cultural differences in the use of negotiation strategies and associated outcomes.
To address these constraints, we propose a framework that integrates research on culture and negotiation with emerging knowledge from cultural psychology. Our framework encourages researchers to shift their focus across the boundary of what is known to what is suggested by the evidence. Our immediate goal is to stimulate new research on culture and negotiation that pushes beyond the boundaries of current knowledge regarding the strategies and outcomes of negotiators from around the world. Our broader goal is to provide a new direction for management researchers investigating how interdependent decision making unfolds across cultures.
We develop our perspective across three sections. First, we review the theory and existing evidence concerning negotiation strategy and joint gains. Negotiation strategy represents the way that people negotiate—the goal-directed behaviors they use to reach agreement (Weingart, Thompson, Bazerman, & Carroll, 1990). The research we review focuses on the use of two strategies: Q&A (questions and answers; an integrative, value creating negotiation strategy typically associated with high trust) and S&O (substantiation and offers; a distributive, value claiming negotiation strategy typically associated with low trust; Kong, Dirks & Ferrin, 2014). The reviewed research emphasizes the effects of these strategies on the important outcome of joint gains: a measure of the value created in a negotiation (Raffia, 1982).
Next, we review the literature documenting cultural differences in the use of negotiation strategy. This review reveals that, at the cultural level of analysis, Q&A is not always the prototypical negotiation strategy in high trust cultures, and S&O is not always the prototypical negotiation strategy in low trust cultures. To address these anomalies, we propose a new theoretical explanation grounded in the cultural-level constructs of trust and tightness-looseness. Trust is the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to another in social interaction (Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998). At the cultural level, it refers to the general belief that others are trustworthy. Tightness-looseness is the degree to which cultural norms are strongly endorsed, conformity to those norms is socially monitored, and violations are socially sanctioned (Gelfand, Nishii, & Raver, 2006). We propose that the interaction of trust and tightness-looseness can explain the cultural-level anomalies associated with the use of the Q&A and S&O strategies.
Finally, we turn to the literature documenting cultural differences in the effectiveness of particular negotiation strategies for producing joint gains. Although it is theoretically possible to consider negotiation strategies or outcomes in isolation, we include outcomes in our analysis because a discussion of cultural differences in strategy naturally raises the question of what effect the strategies used in different cultures will have on negotiators’ outcomes. Our review of the literature reveals that in some cultures, high joint gains are associated with the prototypical use of S&O, not of Q&A as widely documented (Brett & Thompson, 2016). To address this anomaly, we propose a theoretical explanation grounded in the construct of holistic versus analytic mindset. Mindset refers to a pattern of attention and reasoning that emphasizes context (holistic mindset) versus content (analytic mindset), and mindset varies systematically with culture (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). We propose that the interaction of negotiation strategy and mindset can explain cultural-level differences in the relationship between the use of negotiation strategy and joint gains.
We complete our new perspective by integrating three cultural constructs—trust, tightness-looseness, and holistic versus analytic mindset—into a theoretical framework, which provides an explanation for cultural differences in the use and effectiveness of negotiation strategy. In proposing our framework, we do not rely on Hofstede’s (1980) cultural values, which have shown a dearth of explanatory power in culture and negotiation research (Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006). Instead, our framework offers a novel yet evidence-based and integrated explanation for cultural differences in the use and effectiveness of negotiation strategies.
We propose this new framework in the interest of encouraging negotiation researchers to cross knowledge boundaries by questioning preconceptions, challenging assumptions, and integrating new or different theory into their research on culture and negotiation. Our new framework—based on cultural levels of trust, tightness-looseness, and holistic versus analytic mindset—offers a fresh perspective with clear, theoretically grounded guidance for future research. In the following sections, as we review the literature and develop the reasoning for our perspective, we seek to distinguish between what the evidence indicates and what it suggests.
Negotiation Strategy and Joint Gains
Negotiation is the social process by which two or more interdependent parties make decisions, allocate resources, or resolve disputes (Brett, 2014). In essence, negotiators try to reach an agreement that works out the details of their interdependence while protecting and advancing their interests. Negotiated agreements produce outcomes for the involved parties, of which joint gains are one particularly important type. Joint gains represent the total value created and subsequently divided by the negotiated agreement. Since agreements involving high joint gains tend to create advantageous economic outcomes for all sides, generate satisfaction, and facilitate relationships and agreement implementation, they are an important metric for gauging negotiation effectiveness (Brett, 2014). Yet, agreements involving high joint gains are difficult to achieve, at times because negotiators fail to use optimal strategies (Thompson, 2014).
Foundational negotiation theory (Walton & McKersie, 1965) proposes two types of strategy: distributive strategy, in which the negotiator’s goal is focused narrowly on claiming value for the self, and integrative strategy, in which the negotiator’s goal is focused more broadly on creating value for both the self and the other (and then claiming a sufficient portion of the joint value). Distributive strategy consists of behaviors like making and substantiating offers. Here, we use the term S&O (Substantiation & Offers; Gunia, et al., 2011) to refer to the behaviors underlying distributive strategy. Negotiators intent on claiming value rely heavily, although not exclusively, on distributive strategy (De Dreu, Weingart, & Kwon, 2000). Integrative strategy consists of behaviors like asking questions and sharing information about interests (motives underlying a party’s requests), priorities (what a party values more or less), and potential trade-offs. Here, we use the term Q&A (Questions & Answers; Gunia et al., 2011) to refer to the behaviors underlying integrative strategy. Negotiators intent on creating value rely heavily, though not exclusively, on integrative strategy (De Dreu et al., 2000). In general, research (e.g., Kong, Dirks, & Ferrin, 2014) shows integrative strategies like Q&A are more conducive to high joint gains than distributive strategies like S&O, as the former facilitate an information exchange that helps negotiators understand both negotiators’ interests and priorities, i.e., to achieve “insight” (Pruitt, 1981; Thompson & Hastie, 1990).
Although Walton and McKersie’s conceptualization summarizes much of the research on negotiation strategy, we also integrate the foundational work of Pruitt (1981), who proposed a conceptualization of negotiation strategy that departs from Walton and McKersie’s (1965) in several ways. Most importantly here, Pruitt proposed that, at least in principle, negotiators could use strategies like S&O to generate high joint gains. Though he did not use the term “S&O,” Pruitt suggested that since negotiators make offers in their own interest and substantiate them in accordance with subjective importance, S&O-like strategies implicitly communicate information about interests and priorities that the counterpart could use to make trade-offs and create joint gains. He conceded that extracting such information from S&O takes second-order processing, and that the negotiators in his studies (American undergraduate students) did not do so.
Cultural Differences in the Use of Negotiation Strategy
Culture describes the unique character of a group, extending from norms (standards of appropriate behavior), to beliefs (expectations of others’ behaviors), to values (what is more or less important to people), to behaviors (Lytle, Brett, Barsness, Tinsley, & Janssens, 1995). In this section, we review research on negotiations that is both intracultural, which means that negotiations occur between two members of the same culture, and comparative, which means that the studies compare the use of strategy in intracultural negotiations in two or more cultures. This research tests for the relative degree of between- versus within-group differences, where groups are national cultures. When significant differences are reported, cultural group means reflect distinct central tendencies or cultural prototypes. Note that a prototype implies not only a central tendency, but also variation around that central tendency. This means that a prototype differs from a stereotype, which implies no variation. Finally, neither we, nor the research we review, mean to suggest that culture is the only factor influencing negotiators’ choice of strategy—only that it represents a potentially important influence.
With these considerations in mind, we identified relevant studies by drawing from a meta-analysis on negotiation strategy and joint gains that made cultural comparisons (Vogel, Brett, Ramirez-Marin, 2017). Please see Appendix A for details on the meta-analysis search process. Appendix B lists the national cultures under investigation in each of the studies that we identified. Appendix C reports the negotiation strategy results from each of the identified papers and summarizes the studies’ characteristics. We note that the studies included in our analysis span a number of years. Although we cannot rule out the possibility of changes over time, cultures change very slowly because they represent collectively created social environments that provide predictability (Yamagishi & Hashimoto, 2016). Thus, we consider older and newer studies broadly comparable. We did not include intercultural studies because the observed strategies could not be attributed to a single culture.
We reviewed the methods sections of each of the included studies to identify the use of Q&A and S&O. Indicators of Q&A included information sharing and seeking, collaborating, questions and answers about information and priorities, and problem solving. Indicators of S&O included emotional tactics; appeals to logic; influence tactics (putdowns, demands, threats); punishment; contending, avoiding, forcing, contentious behavior, and concession making; persuasive arguments; and undifferentiated offers.
We then used the studies’ statistical results to classify a culture as Q&A or S&O prototypical. First, we collected all of the studies comparing the use of negotiation strategy in a focal culture with the use of negotiation strategy in other cultures. We then reviewed the statistical differences. For example, three studies reported data comparing Chinese and U.S. negotiators’ use of strategy (Aslani, Ramirez-Marin et al., 2016; Dong, 2006; Lui, 2009). In all three studies, the Chinese negotiators used S&O statistically more often than the U.S. negotiators, and the U.S. negotiators used Q&A statistically more often than the Chinese negotiators. A fourth study (Lügger et al., 2015) compared German and Chinese negotiators. The Chinese again used S&O statistically more often than the Germans, and the Germans used Q&A statistically more often than the Chinese. Patterns of results like these, which were remarkably consistent across studies, samples, and simulations, led us to classify a culture as Q&A or S&O prototypical. Our national culture classifications appear in Appendix C.
In classifying a national culture as Q&A (S&O) prototypical, we do not mean that all negotiators in that culture only use Q&A (S&O). We also do not mean that negotiators in a prototypically Q&A culture never use S&O. Rather, we mean that the extant research implies that negotiators from some cultures devote relatively more of their negotiating time to Q&A (S&O) than to S&O (Q&A).
Our classification of national cultures as Q&A or S&O prototypical revealed similarities within and differences between four regions of the world: the West, East Asia, “Latin cultures” (including Latin America, Spain, and Portugal), and the Middle East/South Asia. Global organizations like the World Bank (World Bank Annual Report, 2016) commonly use such regional designations. Recognizing that the number of studies available for review is limited, the results of our classification reveal three patterns in the data. Figure 1 shows that Western culture nations (Germany, Israel, Norway, Sweden, U.S.) were classified as Q&A prototypical, while East Asian (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand) and Middle Eastern/South Asian nations (India, Qatar) were classified as S&O prototypical. The limited studies reporting on the use of negotiation strategy within the Latin cultures show a mix of Q&A (prototypical in Brazil) and S&O (prototypical in Mexico and Spain). These intriguing patterns naturally raise the question of how to explain these differences in the use of negotiation strategies.
A Cultural Perspective on the Use of Negotiation Strategies
Culture and negotiation studies have used many different constructs to explain cultural differences with limited success. One reason why traditional cultural constructs (e.g. individualism-collectivism) have demonstrated limited explanatory power (Kirkman et al., 2006) may be the lack of a theoretically grounded framework that links the cultural constructs to the context of negotiation. Trust and cultural tightness-looseness are two psychological constructs that vary systematically between cultures and have relevance in the context of negotiation. We propose that the interaction between the two constructs may provide a potential explanation for, and therefore a theoretically grounded opportunity for research on cultural differences in the use of negotiation strategy. The next sections develop our reasoning.
Proposed Influence #1: Trust
Trust is an important predictor of the use of negotiation strategy (Kong et al., 2014). Negotiators who trust that their counterpart will not exploit shared information about interests and priorities tend to use Q&A. Trust enables them to accept the vulnerability inherent in exchanging such information. Conversely, negotiators who do not trust tend to use S&O, as they are unwilling to accept the vulnerabilities inherent in exchanging information and may disbelieve information shared by the counterpart (Gunia et al., 2011).
Building on research that generalizes from the individual to the cultural level of analysis (Gunia et al., 2011) we propose that cultural differences in trust may partially explain cultural differences in the use of strategy. Trust varies across cultures (Branzei, Vertinsky, & Camp, 2007; Delhey & Newton, 2005; Yamagishi, Cook, & Watabe, 1998). This variation does not seem to be attributable to differences in the core conceptualization of trust. Terms like reliability, benevolence, responsibility, integrity, and dependability turn up repeatedly in studies comparing the conceptualizations of trust across cultures (Ferrin & Gillespie, 2010). Appendix D presents trust data from the World Values Survey (WVS).
The WVS trust question is “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” (a binary choice). Figure 2 aggregates the WVS trust data from the countries in Appendix D to the regional level, depicting the average percent of people within the countries in a region who replied: “Most people can be trusted.” Figure 2 shows that trust is generally low in Latin cultures and the Middle East/South Asia, but moderately high in East Asia and even higher in the West.
Looking at Figures 1 and 2 together, it is apparent that relationships between trust and negotiation strategy at the individual level—positive for Q&A, negative for S&O (Kong et al., 2014)—are not sufficient to explain the regional cultural differences in trust and the use of negotiation strategy. East Asia and Latin cultures are the anomalies. The figures show that the relatively high-trust East Asians are S&O-prone, which has been associated with low trust in a preponderance of (mostly Western) research (Kong et al., 2014). The figures also show that negotiators from some low-trust Latin cultures rely more on S&O (e.g., Mexico and Spain) whereas negotiators from others rely more on Q&A (e.g., Brazil). We turn to the cultural construct of tightness-looseness to propose an explanation for these anomalies.
Proposed Influence #2: Tightness-looseness
Cultures vary in terms of tightness-looseness (Gelfand, Nishi, & Raver, 2006; Gelfand et al., 2011). A relatively tight culture is one in which norms for social behavior in many situations are clearly defined, pervasive, and reliably imposed via sanctioning (Gelfand et al., 2006; Pelto, 1968). A relatively loose culture is one in which norms are less pervasive and behavior is less constrained because systems for social monitoring and sanctioning are weakly developed (Gelfand, Nishii, & Raver, 2006). Because individuals’ social psychological processes are influenced by context, those living in tight cultures become accustomed to basing their behavior on the strong norms and sanctioning systems that surround them in many situations. Those living in loose cultures, in contrast, become accustomed to choosing their own behavior from among a range of normatively acceptable options. In sum, cultural tightness means that people carefully attend and adjust their behavior to a situation’s norms and sanctions, while cultural looseness means that people exercise relatively more behavioral choice (Gelfand et al., 2011).
Gelfand and colleagues’ (2011) cultural tightness-looseness measure has four important qualities. It shows high within-nation agreement and between-nation variability. It has convergent validity with expert ratings and unobtrusive measures. It shows predictable correlations with environmental factors like natural disasters. It is distinct from other cultural dimensions like individualism-collectivism, and from trust. (The correlation between cultural tightness-looseness and WVS trust across the 33 countries with data reported in Appendix D is a non-significant .04.) Figure 3 organizes Gelfand et al.’s 33-country cultural tightness-looseness data by region; high scores indicate cultural tightness. Figure 3 shows that the Middle East and South Asia as well as East Asia are culturally tighter than Latin or Western cultures.
The Intersection between Cultural Levels of Trust and Tightness-looseness
We propose that an interaction between cultural levels of trust and tightness-looseness may explain cultural differences in the prototypical use of negotiation strategy. That is, cultural differences in negotiation strategy may depend on the negotiators’ culturally prototypical level of trust as well as their culturally prototypical tightness-looseness. The empirical rationale for this proposition lies in the confluence of the negotiation strategy data in Figure 1, trust data in Figure 2, and tightness-looseness data in Figure 3. Figures 4 and 5 integrate these patterns.
Figure 4 shows that the West, relative to the other regions of the world, is high trust (Figure 2) and culturally loose (Figure 3). Latin cultures are low trust (Figure 2) and culturally loose (Figure 3). East Asian cultures are high trust (Figure 2) and culturally tight (Figure 3). The Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures are low trust (Figure 2) and culturally tight (Figure 3). Figure 5, which classifies cultural negotiation strategy prototypes by trust and cultural tightness, shows that Q&A is prototypical in high trust, loose cultures. S&O is prototypical in both low and high trust cultures that are also tight. The limited data from negotiations in low trust, loose cultures shows Q&A prototypical in Brazil, which is culturally loose, and S&O prototypical in Mexico, which is loose in absolute terms but relatively tighter than Brazil. Based on this analysis, we propose that cultural levels of trust may be one important influence on negotiators’ choice of a strategy (as suggested by individual-level research; e.g., Kong et al., 2014), but cultural tightness-looseness may moderate this effect.
We offer the following theoretical rationale for this perspective: As noted, at a baseline level, low trust tends to encourage S&O in negotiation, while high trust tends to encourage Q&A. Thus, relatively low trust Middle Eastern, South Asian and Latin cultures should show a tendency to display S&O, while relatively high trust Western and East Asian cultures should show a tendency to display Q&A. The evidence from the Middle Eastern, South Asian and Western cultures is largely consistent with this prediction, but the evidence from the Latin and East Asian cultures is less consistent. Tightness-looseness may help to explain both the consistent evidence and the anomalies for the following reasons.
Although negotiations have both competitive and cooperative elements, the predominant norm in negotiations around the world is thought to be competition (Bazerman, Magliozzi, & Neale, 1985; Bazerman & Neale; 1992; Brett, 2014; Fukuno & Ohbuchi, 1997, Thompson & DeHarpport 1994, Thompson & Hastie 1990). That is, many negotiators assume that competition is the most normatively appropriate and sanctioned behavior in a negotiation context. Accordingly, many negotiators display the fixed-pie bias, treating the set of resources under discussion as strictly fixed and rife for distribution (Bazerman & Neale, 1992).
Since individuals from tight cultures attend closely to a situation’s predominant norm and sanctioning system, basing their behavior squarely on the situation (Gelfand et al., 2011), these individuals should show a sensitivity to negotiation’s predominant norm of competition. In other words, they should show a tendency to display S&O strategy. Since Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures are not only tight but relatively low trust, and since both factors encourage S&O, this strategy should be observed in these cultures. It generally is.
Conversely, and as noted, individuals from loose cultures have more flexibility with respect to norms and choose their behaviors from among a range of options (Gelfand et al., 2011). Thus, although negotiators from loose cultures will not be completely immune to the negotiation norm of competition (Bazerman & Neale, 1992), we expect them to have facility in experimenting with different strategic options. A strategy like Q&A can be used to test whether the counterpart will reciprocate a negotiator’s information-sharing about interests and priorities, and thus evaluate whether the counterpart is willing to cooperate (Yao, Zhang, & Brett, 2016). If this reasoning is correct, negotiators in loose cultures should use more Q&A than negotiatiators in tight cultures. Since Western cultures are not only loose but relatively high trust, and since both factors encourage Q&A, this strategy should be observed in these cultures. It generally is.
However, competing cultural cues of trust and tightness-looseness may offer negotiaors diverging situational guidance. In other words, tightness-looseness may moderate the predicted effects of trust. Consider Latin cultures, which are relatively low trust but loose. Low trust would suggest a prototypical use of S&O, but Q&A has been observed in at least one Latin culture (and one of the loosest): Brazil. Given that cultural levels of trust do not account for this observation, we offer the perspective that looseness may provide a competing cultural cue, affording Latin culture negotiations some facility in experimenting with Q&A. Conversely, consider East Asian cultures, which are relatively high trust but tight. High trust would suggest a prototypical use of Q&A, but S&O has been observed in such cultures. Given that cultural levels of trust do not account for this observation, we offer the perspective that tightness may provide a competing cultural cue, prompting East Asian negotiators to attend closely to a negotiation’s competitive norms. These “off-diagonal” cases highlight intriguing opportunities for future research into the potentially competing effects of cultural cues of trust and tightness-looseness.
In sum, the extant evidence indicates that negotiators from different cultures tend to rely on different strategies. Crossing the boundary between what is known and what can be inferred from the evidence, we offer the perspective that the interaction between cultural levels of trust and tightness-looseness may explain cultural differences in the use of negotiation strategy. We fully acknowledge that this perspective is suggestive, not conclusive, and that cultural levels of trust and tightness-looseness may not be the only cultural constructs that explain cultural differences in negotiation strategy. Nevertheless, we suggest that these constructs may account for cultural differences in the fundamental predictability of people’s behavior in negotiation.
Insightful as a global examination into the use of negotiation strategy is, it addresses only half of the picture because it only indirectly implies why these cultural differences are important. Since negotiation outcomes are a function of strategy, an analysis of culture and negotiation strategy would be incomplete without considering cultural differences in effectiveness of negotiation strategies, particularly with respect to the important outcome of joint gains. The next sections turn to that issue, first synthesizing research highlighting intriguing patterns of cultural variance in the effectiveness of negotiation strategies for producing joint gains, then proposing a promising yet tentative explanation: cultural differences in holistic versus analytic mindset.
Cultural Differences in the Effectiveness of Negotiation Strategy
Our review of the research linking culture, negotiation strategy and joint gains raises the intriguing possibility that negotiators from different cultures may achieve similar outcomes using different negotiation strategies, or different outcomes using the same negotiation strategy. For example, Japanese and American negotiators reach similar levels of insight and joint gains (Brett & Okumura, 1998), but the Japanese prototypically do so using S&O while the Americans prototypically use Q&A (Adair, Okumura & Brett, 2001). Subsequent research using the latter dataset showed that Japanese negotiators who made early offers achieved among the highest joint gains, whereas the Americans who did so achieved among the lowest (Adair, Weingart, & Brett, 2007). These results suggest that offers were the key to Japanese, but not American negotiators’ success. Likewise, a study contrasting Chinese, American, and Qatari negotiators found that American and Chinese joint gains were not significantly different (Aslani et al., 2016, though in this study Qatari negotiators’ joint gains were lower than the Americans’). However, the Americans achieved joint gains through Q&A, while the Chinese achieved joint gains via another, as-yet undocumented strategy. These limited but intriguing patterns of cultural variance in the effectiveness of negotiation strategy lack an integrated theoretical cultural explanation.
The evidence suggests that a latent cultural construct may account for cultural differences in the way that negotiators infer the counterparty’s interests and priorities to make trade-offs and realize joint gains. Adair and her colleagues (2001) offered high versus low context communication (Hall, 1976) as an explanation. In high context communication cultures, people communicate implicitly and indirectly (e.g., through hints, stories, or metaphors), so listeners must make inferences about the context of the communication to detect meaning. In low context communication cultures, people more explicitly state their intended messages so listeners do not have to “read between the lines” to detect meaning (Hall, 1976).
Recent research and theorizing in psychology, however, has attributed these cultural communication differences to cognitive differences in the way that people process information—that is, to their holistic versus analytic mindset (Miyamoto, 2013; Nisbett et al., 2001; Norenzayan, Smith, Kim, & Nisbett, 2002). Holistic versus analytic mindset seems to explain the information-processing element of high versus low context communication. Put differently, different styles of thinking manifest in different communication styles. Given this logic, and since mindset has been more thoroughly and recently developed, we focus on mindset, seeing that focus as a consistent elaboration on Adair and colleagues’ (2001) explanation.
A mindset is a system of thought that directs attention and reasoning (Nisbett et al., 2001). People with holistic versus analytic mindsets use fundamentally different cognitive processes. Those with a holistic mindset tend to consider an object’s context, using associative reasoning to understand the situation as a whole. For example, they may rely on metaphors and stories to cue associations, and, when confronted with contradictory perspectives, try to transcend the contradictions (Nisbett, et al., 2001). Conversely, people with an analytic mindset focus on content, assigning objects to categories based on their attributes. They tend to use linear reasoning to understand each aspect of a situation in turn, and they may experience discomfort with contradictions. Faced with contradictions, analytic thinkers often prefer to choose one perspective over another (Nisbett et al., 2001).
Mindset varies systematically between Eastern and Western cultures, with Easterners often categorized as holistic and Westerners as analytic (Chua, Boland & Nisbett, 2005; Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003; Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan & Nisbett, 2008; Masuda & Nisbett, 2006; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005; Norenzayan et al., 2002). Cultural differences in attention, categorization, and reasoning identified by cultural psychological research are also appearing in neuro-imaging research (Goh, Chee, Tan, Venkatraman, Hebrank, Leshikar…Park, 2007; Gutchess, Welsh, Boduroĝlu, & Park, 2006; Han & Northoff, 2008; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Jenkins, Yang, Goh, Hong, & Park, 2010; and Miyamoto, 2013 for a recent review of this research).
An exemplar study documented the varying brain activation patterns that occur when holistic thinkers (Chinese nationals new to a U.S. university) and analytic thinkers (American university students) were processing images in which the background was consistent (e.g., a sheep in a meadow) versus inconsistent (a sheep in a building; Jenkins et al., 2010). Holistic Chinese participants, who were expected to consider the whole scene, showed significantly greater discomfort with incongruent scenes (sheep in building) than did American participants, who tended to fixate on the sheep and ignore its context (the building). The authors concluded that Chinese participants were more sensitive to contextual incongruity; if the Americans noticed the incongruity, they responded by focusing greater attention on the object. Interestingly, when the researchers retested their participants at the end of the first school year, Chinese participants’ reactions more closely resembled Americans’ reactions, suggesting that the Chinese had acclimated to the American analytic mindset (Jenkins et al., 2010).
We propose that holistic versus analytic mindset is an important aspect of culture that may interact with negotiation strategy to produce divergent outcomes. Mindset is relevant for evaluating the effect of strategies on outcomes because it refers to the way that people process information. Different negotiation strategies produce different kinds of information. Q&A tends to produce a linear series of direct information about negotiators’ interests and priorities. S&O, however, tends to occur in a disjointed fashion throughout a negotiation and thus produces less direct, and less linear, forms of information about priorities and preferences. Turning the information produced by Q&A or S&O into outcomes like joint gains necessarily involves processing it. Thus, the natural focus in an examination of negotiation outcomes would be factors like mindset that influence the way that people process information. Based on our review of the limited prior research, we propose that negotiators from holistic mindset cultures may be able to generate higher levels of insight into each other’s interests and priorities and realize higher joint gains from S&O than negotiators from analytic mindset cultures. Conversely, we suggest that negotiators from analytic mindset cultures may generate higher levels of insight and joint gains from Q&A than negotiators from holistic mindset cultures.
The rationale for this perspective is that in cultures that emphasize holistic thinking, negotiators are likely to process information embedded in offers and substantiation the same way they process other information: in context. Thus, a holistic negotiator may infer the counterpart’s priorities from an extended pattern of concessions and substantiation by the counterpart. For example, if a counterpart makes a small concession on one issue but later makes a large concession on another issue, a focal negotiator may infer that the large-concession-issue is less important than the small-concession-issue. Likewise, if a counterpart substantiates one offer but not another, the focal negotiator may infer that the substantiated offer is more important to the counterpart than the unsubstantiated offer. Since substantiation and offers are often disjointed and scattered throughout a negotiation, negotiators with a holistic mindset may be better able to make sense of the information about interests and priorities embedded in offers and substantiation than negotiators with an analytic mindset, who process information linearly.
In sum, by analyzing issues in context, holistic mindset negotiators may be able to apply the heuristic that Pruitt (1981) first articulated—concede on low priority issues and hold firm on high priority issues—to infer the counterpart’s interests and priorities. Although Pruitt suggested that generating insight into interests and priorities from S&O strategy requires second-order processing, and he admitted he had no evidence that negotiators were doing do, his studies occurred in a prototypically analytic culture: the United States. We propose that negotiators from holistic mindset cultures are more likely than those from analytic mindset cultures to engage in the second-order processing required to infer interests and priorities from patterns of offers and substantiation, simply because they process information holistically on a daily basis. Indeed, a holistic mindset is essentially a form of second-order processing in that holistic thinkers automatically consider foreground and background in tandem (Jenkins et al., 2010).
In contrast, in cultures that emphasize analytic thinking, people focus on objects and their attributes. Having heard their negotiation counterpart make or substantiate an offer, analytic mindset negotiators may process that information the same way they process any other information: by focusing closely on its content. In other words, analytic negotiators may treat each attempt at substantiation or each offer as a discrete instance. Thus, they may not interpret an offer in the context of substantiation or offers that have been made on other issues, making it difficult for them to extract insight into the counterpart’s interests or priorities.
However, consider an analytic mindset negotiator’s reaction to a counterpart’s Q&A. Unlike S&O, Q&A tends to follow a linear sequence. One negotiator asks a question, and the other answers. These questions could focus on positions (e.g., what do you want?) but also on interests (e.g., why do you want that?) or priorities (e.g., what is more important to you?). The answers would then provide direct information about those issues. Since analytic negotiators are used to extracting insights from a linear sequence of information, they should be able to extract insight about the counterpart’s interests and priorities from Q&A. Because Q&A provides information about the content of issues in a relatively linear fashion, Q&A should fit particularly well with an analytic mindset. In contrast, since S&O provides disjointed and scattered bits of information throughout the course of a negotiation, it may be difficult for an analytic mindset negotiator to extract information about the counterpart’s interests and priorities from S&O.
In sum, a cultural proclivity to analyze information holistically may make it easier for negotiators to extract information about interests and priorities from S&O, whereas a cultural proclivity to analyze information analytically may make it easier for negotiators to extract information about interests and priorities from Q&A. These predictions build on evidence indicating that negotiators from different cultures generate the similar outcomes via the use of different strategies, as well as different outcomes with the same strategies. We propose that holistic versus analytic mindset may capture the relevant aspect of cognition underlying the evidence of cultural differences in the effectiveness of negotiation strategy.
We would be the first to acknowledge that this perspective moves beyond the boundary of current data. Although empirical research has considered high versus low context communication as a moderator of a negotiation strategy’s effectiveness (Adair et al., 2001), neither that construct nor the higher-level construct of mindset have been tested empirically in the negotiation context. Nevertheless, and in keeping with the mission of Perspectives, we offer holistic versus analytic mindset as a promising perspective that theoretically integrates the research that is available for review. We encourage cultural researchers, neuroscientists and negotiation researchers to collaborate and explore the possibility that mindset moderates the effectiveness of particular strategies for generating joint gains in negotiation.
A New Perspective on Culture and Negotiation Strategy
To summarize, we propose a framework that integrates mounting evidence of cultural differences in the use and effectiveness of negotiation strategies with emerging knowledge from cultural psychology. Figure 6 presents the overall framework, showing culture as manifest in three constructs: trust, tightness-looseness, and holistic versus analytic mindset. The framework proposes that 1) cultural levels of trust and tightness-looseness interact to account for cultural differences in the use of negotiation strategy; and 2) holistic versus analytic mindset interacts with negotiation strategy to account for cultural differences in the joint gains associated with particular strategies. We hope that this framework, by identifying potential sources of cultural differences in negotiation strategies and outcomes, challenges researchers to set aside their preconceptions and assumptions about culture and negotiation in favor of new research that tests and broadens our framework—particularly in understudied cultures within Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
General Discussion
Implications for New Research on Culture and Negotiation
We have already described what we consider the most pressing priorities for future research on culture and negotiation: the investigation of trust and tightness-looseness in-tandem as an explanation for cultural differences in negotiation strategy use, and the investigation of mindset and strategy in-tandem as an explanation for cultural differences in the relationship between negotiation strategy and outcomes. We now turn to the implications of our framework for two areas of emerging research on culture and negotiation: multi-issue offers and intercultural negotiations.
In addition to raising the possibility that negotiators might use S&O to gain insight and create value, Pruitt (1981) identified a strategy that other scholars have not often examined: heuristic trial and error processing. This strategy involves making a multi-issue offer that incorporates all of the issues and then reciprocally exchanging multi-issue offers using the heuristic: concede on low-priority issues and hold firm on high-priority issues until you reach an impasse or agreement. Pruitt suggested that this strategy could be used to generate joint gains, as negotiators might “land” on a value-creating trade-off out of luck or persistence. This strategy differs from S&O by the multiple issues in an offer as well as the associated heuristic.
Although Pruitt (1981) offered some evidence of American undergraduate students using heuristic trial and error to create joint gains, the evidence was somewhat weak, and the strategy has since received little attention. The closest strategic equivalent is negotiation strategy research that measures multi-issue offers (MIO) separately from substantiation and single issue offers (Weingart, et al., 1990; Olekalns & Smith, 2003a; 2003b; Liu & Wilson, 2011). This MIO research is currently somewhat sparse, equivocal (e.g., MIO sometimes covaries with S&O and sometimes with Q&A; Weingart et al., 1990; Weingart, Brett, Olekalns & Smith, 2007), and incomplete (e.g., because it is not clear when in a negotiation MIO are being used).
Although the published empirical evidence of negotiators using MIO to negotiate joint gains is limited, this may reflect the fact that studies with Western culture samples dominate the negotiation literature. Indeed, several recent papers and works in progress suggest that East Asian negotiators may use just this strategy to generate joint gains. In comparisons of Chinese and American negotiators, for example, Chinese negotiators used proportionally more MIO than U.S. counterparts but generated comparable gains (Liu &Wilson, 2011; working paper with reference suppressed for blind review). Our framework suggests that negotiators from holistic mindset cultures should be more adept than those from analytic mindset cultures, in inferring a counterpart’s interests and priorities from a series of multi-issue offers.
Another important area for future research is intercultural negotiations. What might happen when both negotiators in an intercultural negotiation come from cultures with the same prototypical strategy? Or when one negotiator comes from a Q&A prototypical culture and the other comes from an S&O prototypical culture? Given the limited research on the dynamics of negotiation strategy in these settings, any predictions are preliminary. Nevertheless, given the importance of intercultural negotiations for global economic growth, we wish to encourage intercultural negotiation research and so propose that the ideas and cultural explanations underlying our framework may provide important insights into the dynamics of intercultural negotiations. To stimulate thinking about this application of our framework to intercultural negotiations, we propose the following possibilities, which focus on the overt behaviors that intercultural negotiators may display and observe at the bargaining table.
When two negotiators from S&O-prototypical cultures—or two negotiators from Q&A-prototypical cultures—meet at the bargaining table, their behavior is unlikely to change very much. Given convergence of negotiators’ behavior (e.g., Brett, Shapiro, & Lytle, 1998), the two negotiators are likely to reciprocate each other’s behavior, producing a pattern very similar to their behavior in intracultural negotiations.
When a negotiator from an S&O-prototypical culture meets with a negotiator from a Q&A-prototypical culture, however, predictions about the strategies that are likely to emerge become more nuanced. Based on our framework, we propose that negotiators’ flexibility in strategy use will depend on the particular cultural combination of trust and tightness-looseness that gave rise to their strategic tendencies. As examples, the S&O culture negotiator’s behavioral tendency could stem from low trust and cultural looseness or low trust and cultural tightness. If the tendency stems from low trust and cultural looseness, the negotiator might show a willingness to reciprocate the counterpart’s Q&A, as negotiators from Latin cultures seem to do in an intercultural setting (Ramirez-Marin, 2016). If the tendency stems from low trust and cultural tightness, the negotiator seems unlikely to reciprocate Q&A given the intracultural findings from South Asia (Gunia et al., 2011).
The Q&A culture negotiator’s behavioral tendency, stemming from cultural high trust and looseness may show some (albeit limited) resilience: This negotiator may persist in the use of Q&A despite the counterpart’s S&O, as Q&A negotiators sometimes do (Adair et al, 2001; Lügger et al., 2015). However, the intercultural research suggests a more likely scenario: the Q&A culture negotiator will switch to S&O rather quickly (Lügger et al., 2015). These predictions are tentative and require more research, but they offer intriguing signposts for intercultural researchers wondering where to start.
Implications for Management Research
Our framework addressing the cultural influences on negotiation behaviors and the relationship between negotiation strategy and outcomes may have implications for the research of organizational scholars who study interdependent decisions that unfold in multiple cultures or across cultures. Our framework may be particularly relevant for studies of decision making that occur under the rubric of topics like leadership and teamwork, creativity, productivity, and collaboration. The constraints of too many cultural constructs and too few integrating frameworks to explain cultural differences may hinder research in these areas, just as it does in the domain of negotiation. Addressing cultural differences in interdependent decision making through the lens of trust, tightness-looseness, and mindset may open up new arenas for management research. We illustrate this potential by exploring some implications of our analysis for interdependent decision making at several levels of analysis. Although our examples are illustrative and preliminary, they highlight the wide range of managerial research questions that our perspective might inform.
In the domain of negotiation strategy, we proposed that a combination of high trust and cultural looseness, prototypical of the U.S. and Western Europe, can generate Q&A strategy. More broadly, Q&A represents an open and direct form of information exchange, in which the parties reciprocally and collectively engage in a process that systematically works through the information in a linear fashion. One analogue for decision making research is that executives from high trust, loose cultures may be more likely than managers from low trust, tight cultures to engage in open and direct information exchange when making decisions. For an organization keen on accelerating innovation by using multicultural teams, a predominance of team members from high trust, loose cultures might surface a relatively large set of ideas, though open questioning of those ideas may cause production blocking, particularly among team members from low trust-tight cultures.
At the other end of the spectrum, we proposed that a combination of low trust and cultural tightness, prototypical of the Middle East and South Asia, can generate S&O strategy. S&O is a competitive yet guarded form of information exchange, in which the parties compete for dominance. Individual decision makers from such cultures might guard their intentions during decision making, neither sharing nor seeking as much information as decision makers from cultures in other trust by tightness-looseness quadrants. Strong hierarchy or relationship building may be required to reign in competitive behavior when top-management teams are dominated by members whose culturally prototypical negotiation strategy is S&O.
In negotiations, we argued that a combination of high trust and cultural tightness (prototypical of East Asia) could also generate S&O strategy. The predictions for behavior of people from this quadrant in interdependent decision making situations, however, may depend not only on the cultural backgrounds of the decision makers but also on the structure of the decision making situation, particularly whether these situations have salient cooperative versus competitive norms. Since individual and group decision making is common and relatively routinized in organizations, we suspect that these situations will feature relatively strong norms. This would suggest that the members of top management teams from tight cultures with strong norms of harmony (e.g., Taiwan; Gelfand et al., 2013), for example, would behave rather cooperatively toward one another.
With respect to our thinking about mindset, one clear opportunity for management research is to develop and test hypotheses about the relationship between holistic versus analytic mindset and creativity, as well as its downstream effects on innovation. In part, a person or group’s creativity depends on their integrative complexity: their willingness and capacity to acknowledge and consider differing views on the same issue (known as differentiation) and to forge conceptual links among these perspectives (known as integration; Suedfeld, Tetlock, & Streufert, 1992). A holistic mindset might facilitate integrative complexity or, alternatively, that mindset and integrative complexity might separately contribute to creativity and innovation. Additionally, for those putting together multicultural teams, it would be worthwhile to understand if a holistic mindset might be best suited to creativity and innovation, whereas an analytic mindset might be best suited to execution.
Additionally, the management literature in general would benefit from a deeper understanding of the ways that global experience may affect mindset. As noted, research shows that after a year of study in the U.S., East Asians’ neural patterns (originally holistic) start to resemble Americans’ analytic patterns (Jenkins et al., 2010). Would the opposite pattern of differences emerge among American studying (or working / managing) in China? What is the effect of deep and broad global experience spanning many holistically and analytically minded cultures? To the extent that mindset links to important management processes, these represent critical questions for future research, which we hope our framework will help to stimulate.
Conclusion
Research on culture and negotiation strategy exposes evidence of intriguing patterns of cultural differences in the use and effectiveness of negotiation strategy around the world. Moving beyond the boundary of the extant research and the cultural explanations in individual studies, we propose an integrated framework consisting of three non-traditional constructs from cultural psychology: trust, tightness-looseness, and holistic versus analytic mindset. Specifically, our framework proposes that the interaction between cultural-level trust and tightness-looseness may at least partially explain cultural differences in the strategies that negotiators use. The interaction between these strategies and their culturally prototypical holistic versus analytic mindset, in turn, may partially explain the effectiveness of those strategies for creating joint gains. These constructs are based on suggestive evidence and help to make sense of the documented cultural patterns. Our perspective is that testing them represents an important priority for future research.
Our intent in offering this framework was threefold: First, for negotiation specialists and non-specialists alike, we hoped to bring some measure of order to the fragmented, but intriguing, literature on culture and negotiation. Second, we sought to give current researchers both a reason and a foundation for moving beyond the boundaries of cultural constructs traditionally used for explanation, considering instead whether three constructs from cultural psychology may account for important differences in negotiation strategies and outcomes. Third, we sought to motivate negotiation and management researchers to “go global” with their research, studying their constructs in cultures studied less extensively or not at all. Our framework should help them to do so. More broadly, we challenge management scholars to seek a deeper understanding of the cultural factors that might influence interdependent decision making in the context of an increasingly global world.
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Data are from Appendices 1 and 2.
Figure 1: Frequency of cultures by negotiation strategy by region.
The data in are from Wave 6 (1999-2011) of the World Values Survey for the 33 countries for which there is tightness-looseness data. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSjsp.
Figure 2: Percent who agree others can be trusted by region.
The data are from the 33 countries in Gelfand et al., (2011). Because cultural tightness-looseness is scaled in a rather complex manner, it is best just to interpret high scores as indicating tight and low scores as indicating loose cultures (personal communication, Michele Gelfand, November 11, 2014).
Figure 3: Cultural tightness-looseness by region.
|
Trust |
|||
| High | Low | ||
| Cultural
Tightness |
Tight | East Asia | Middle East/South Asia |
| Loose | West | Latin America | |
Figure 4: Regions by trust and cultural tightness.
| High Trust | Low Trust | ||
| Cultural
Tightness |
Tightness | S&O | S&O |
| Looseness | Q&A | Q&A or S&O | |
Q&A: Questions and Answers; S&O: Substantiation and Offers
Figure 5: Cultural negotiation prototypes by trust and cultural tightness.
Figure 6: A framework integrating cultural explanations for differences in use of negotiation strategy and outcomes.
Appendix A
Methods and Criteria for Identify Studies Documenting Cultural Differences in the Use of Negotiation Strategy
Standard meta-analysis techniques were used to identify and classify relevant studies: e.g., searching Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Proquest; contacting authors for unpublished papers; and reviewing unpublished dissertations. Key search terms in the meta-analysis were negotiation, integrative strategy, integrative tactics, distributive strategy, and distributive tactics. Criteria for inclusion were: a) At least two parties completed a simulated multi-issue negotiation task in person or virtually. Studies that used confederates or computer simulations as half of a negotiation dyad were excluded. b) Integrative and/or distributive strategies were coded using behavioral coding, self-report, or electronic coding, e.g., LIWC. c) Data were available to compute a correlation between integrative or distributive strategy and joint gains or satisfaction. We, the authors of the current paper, reviewed the 80 papers identified in the meta-analysis for two additional inclusion criteria: a) intracultural mean level data were reported on the use of negotiation strategy, b) results from at least two cultures were compared statistically.
Appendix B
Studies Documenting Cultural Differences in the Use of Negotiation Strategy
| Nation | Adair, et al. 2004 | Adair et al., 2001 | Adair, et al., 2007 | Adair & Brett, 2005 | Adler & Graham, 1989 | Aslani et al., 2016 | Brett et al., 1998 | Brett, 2017 Multi-national | Dong, 2006 | Elahee, et al., 2002 |
| Brazil | X | X | ||||||||
| Canada Anglo | X | X | ||||||||
| Canada Franco | X | |||||||||
| China | X | X | ||||||||
| France | X | X | ||||||||
| Germany | X | |||||||||
| Hong Kong | X | X | X | |||||||
| India | ||||||||||
| Israel | X | |||||||||
| Japan | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||
| Mexico | X | |||||||||
| Norway | ||||||||||
| Qatar | X | |||||||||
| Russia | X | X | ||||||||
| Sweden | X | |||||||||
| Spain | ||||||||||
| Thailand | X | |||||||||
| US | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Nation | Gunia et al., 2011 (two studies) | Graham, 1985 | Liu, 2009 | Lűgger et al., 2015ü | Natlandsmyr & Rognes, 1995 | Ramirez- Marin, 2016 | Rosette et al., 2011 | Yang, 2003 | Yao et al., 2017 (29 nations) |
| Brazil | X | ||||||||
| Canada Anglo | |||||||||
| Canada Franco | |||||||||
| China | X | X | |||||||
| France | |||||||||
| Germany | X | ||||||||
| Hong Kong | X | X | |||||||
| India | X | ||||||||
| Israel | |||||||||
| Japan | X | ||||||||
| Mexico | X | ||||||||
| Norway | X | ||||||||
| Qatar | |||||||||
| Russia | |||||||||
| Sweden | |||||||||
| Spain | X | ||||||||
| Thailand | |||||||||
| US | X | X | X | X | X | X |
Appendix C
Characteristics of Studies Documenting Cultural Differences in the Use of Negotiation Strategy
| Paper | Nations (dyads) | Type | Measure | Measures | Sample Type | Sample Size | Simulation | Q&A Results (High to Low) | S&O Results (High to Low) |
| Adair et al., 2004 | Brazil (14), France (18), Hong Kong (32), Russia (90), Japan (44), US (80) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | Q&A; S; Offers | Managers, MBAs Undergrads | 278 | Cartoon | Brazil US> Hong Kong France Japan>Russia | Russia Japan>Hong Kong Brazil> France>US |
| Adair et al., 2001 | Japan (44), US(44) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | Q&A; S&O | MBAs | 176 | Cartoon | US>Japan | Japan>US |
| Adair et al., 2007 | Japan (40), US(40) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | Q&A; Offers | MBAs | 80 | Cartoon | US>Japan | |
| Adair & Brett, 2005 | Low context: Germany (40), Israel (32), Sweden (48), US (54) High context: Hong Kong (36), Japan (48), Russia (72), Thailand (48) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | Reciprocal Q&A; Reciprocal Offers; Reciprocal Substantiation | MBAs (Hong Kong; Russia; Thailand) & Managers | 472 | Cartoon | Low context> High context | |
| Adler & Graham, 1989 | US (160), Japan (42), Canada Anglo (74), Canada Franco (74) | Face to Face | Self Reports | Problem Solving | MBAs & Managers | 350 | Pruitt, 1981 | Cannot determine | |
| Aslani et al., 2016 | Qatar (76), US (94), China (64) | Face to Face | Self Reports | Q&A; S&O | Undergrads | 234 | Sweet Shop | US>China, Qatar | Qatar, China>US |
| Brett et al., 1998 | France (30), Russia (55), Japan (18), Hong Kong (65), Brazil (13), US (47) | Survey | Self Reports of Norms for Negotiation Tactics | Information Sharing; Distributive Tactics | Managers (Brazil, Japan) MBAs other nations | 228 | Survey | Japan>Hong Kong;
US>Hong Kong; France= US=Brazil; Japan US> Russia |
Japan>Hong Kong US; Russia> Hong Kong US; Russia Japan Hong Kong Brazil > France;
France=US |
| Brett, 2016 | East Asia (7 nations, 49), North America Europe (16 nations, 192), Middle East, South Asia, Latin America (24 nations, 152) | Survey | Descriptive Norms | Q&A; S&O | Managers (EMBAs) | Survey | East Asia=US > Middle East South Asia Latin America | East Asia< US<Middle East
South Asia Latin America |
|
| Dong, 2006 | China (124), US (232) | Face to Face | Self Reports of Norms for Negotiation Tactics | Integrative Tactics | Managers | 356 | Survey | US> China | |
| Elahee et al., 2002 | Canada (72), Mexico (84), US (69) | Survey | Self Reports of Preferred Negotiation Tactics | Competitive Bargaining; Attacking Opponent’s Network; Bluffing; Misrepresentation; Inappropriate Information Gathering; Tactic Bargaining | Managers | 225 | Survey | Mexico; US; Canada* | |
| Gunia et al., 2011, Study 2 | US (78), India (56) | Face to Face | Self Reports | Q&A; S&O | Managers | 134 | Cartoon | US>India | India>US |
| Gunia et al., 2011, Study 3 | US (50), India (50) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | Q&A; S&O | Managers | 100 | Cartoon | US>India | India>US |
| Graham, 1985 | Japan (6), US (6), Brazil (6) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | 12 categories | Managers | 18 | Pruitt, 1981 | Promise US, Japan>Brazil Command Brazil>US, Japan;
No Brazil> US, Japan* |
|
| Liu, 2009 | Chinese sojourners (70), US (64) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | Integrative Prioritizing; Integrative Issue Linking; Distributive Positioning; Distributive Persuasion; Integrative Relation Building | Undergrad and Graduate Students | 134 | Employment Contract | US>China all measures | China>US Distributive Persuasion |
| Liu & Wilson, 2011 | Same data as Liu, 2009 | 134 | |||||||
| Lügger et al., 2015 | Germany (177), China (169) | Electronic | Coded Transcripts | Distributive Strategy; Integrative Strategy | Undergrad Students | 346 | Buyer Seller 6 issue | Germany> China | China> Germany |
| Natlandsmyr, & Rognes, 1995 | Mexico (30), Norway (30) | Face to Face | Coded Transcripts | 9 codes from Weingart 1990 | Undergrad Students | 60 | Pruitt, 1981 | Mexico= Norway | Mexico= Norway |
| Ramirez-Marin, 2016 | Spain (45), US (37) | Face to Face | Self Reports | Q&A; S&O | Undergrad Students | 164 | Sweet Shop | Spain=US | Spain>US |
| Rosette et al., 2011, Study 2 | Hong Kong (36), US (54) | Electronic | Coded Transcripts | Opening Offers | Undergrad Students | 90 | Cartoon | ||
| Yang, 2003 | Hong Kong (36), US (140) | Electronic | Coded Transcripts | Integrative Tactics; Distributive Tactics | Students | 408 | Pruitt, 1981 | HK=US | HK>US |
| Yao et al., 2016 | 29 Nations North America & Europe (144), East Asia (38), Latin America, Middle East, South Asia (55) | Survey | Descriptive Norms | Q&A; S&O | MBAs | 237 | Survey | North America & Europe> East Asia>Latin America Middle East South Asia | North America & Europe<East Asia<Latin America Middle East South Asia |
| Yao et al. 2016 | China (96), US (98), US (40) | Face to Face | Self Reports, Coded Transcripts | Q&A Substantiation MIO | EMBAs | 238 | Cartoon | Behavioral Coding China<US Self Report China<US | Behavioral Coding China>US Self Report China>US |
*Indicates that no significance tests were published.
Appendix D
National Culture Findings: Negotiation Strategy, Trust, and Cultural Tightness-Looseness
| Nation | Region | Negotiation Strategy: Q&A Prototypical a | Negotiation Strategy: S&O Prototypical a | World Values Survey Trust (%)b | Cultural Tightness- Looseness c |
| Australia | West | 51.4 | 0.42 | ||
| Austria | West | 45.6 | 0.69 | ||
| Belgium | West | 0.56 | |||
| Brazil | Latin | 1 | 0 | 9.2 | 0.34 |
| China | East Asia | 0 | 1 | 60.3 | 0.82 |
| East Germany | 0.77 | ||||
| Estonia | 0.27 | ||||
| France | West | 18.7 | 0.63 | ||
| Germany | West | 1 | 0 | 44.6 | 0.65 |
| Greece | West | 0.37 | |||
| Hong Kong | East Asia | 0 | 1 | 40.3 | 0.63 |
| Hungary | West | 28.7 | 0.25 | ||
| Iceland | West | 0.64 | |||
| India | ME South Asia | 0 | 1 | 20.7 | 1.03 |
| Israel | West | 1 | 0 | 0.32 | |
| Italy | West | 27.5 | 0.65 | ||
| Japan | East Asia | 0 | 1 | 35.9 | 0.86 |
| Malaysia | 8.5 | 1.19 | |||
| Mexico | Latin | 0 | 1 | 12.4 | 0.68 |
| Netherlands | West | 66.1 | 0.38 | ||
| New Zealand | West | 55.3 | 0.4 | ||
| Norway | West | 1 | 0 | 73.7 | 0.97 |
| Pakistan | ME South Asia | 22.2 | 1.25 | ||
| Poland | West | 22.2 | 0.6 | ||
| Portugal | Latin | 0.76 | |||
| Qatar | ME South Asia | 0 | 1 | 21.4 | |
| Russia | 0 | 1 | 27.8 | ||
| Singapore | East Asia | 1.02 | |||
| South Korea | East Asia | 26.5 | 0.99 | ||
| Spain | Latin | 0 | 1 | 19 | 0.54 |
| Sweden | West | 1 | 0 | 65.2 | |
| Thailand | East Asia | 0 | 1 | 32.1 | |
| Turkey | Middle East | 11.6 | 0.92 | ||
| Ukraine | 0.17 | ||||
| United Kingdom | West | 0.7 | |||
| USA | West | 1 | 0 | 34.8 | 0.54 |
| Venezuela | Latin | 0.37 |
Notes:
a Dominance was determined by means of the Q&A or S&O strategy from self-reports or behavioral coding of transcripts. See Appendix A for references to the empirical studies used to analyze strategic dominance by country.
b Wave 6 data were not collected in all the countries for which there is tightness-looseness data. Although vulnerable to empirical criticisms (e.g., single-item measure, inconsistent sampling) the wave-to-wave reliability of the WVS measure is high. In the sample of countries in Appendix C, the correlation between trust in countries measured in both waves 5 and 6 was .94. Recent empirical research shows significant correlations between country-level WVS trust scores and the amount of money sent in trust games, though not the amount returned (Johnson & Mislin, 2012). Finally, both the WVS and the more country-restricted Gallup World Poll, show similar patterns of cultural differences in trust. (See WVS note in References.)
c Cultural tightness-looseness is scaled using a Leung transformation (Van de Vijver, & Leung, 1997). To avoid within subject response bias, it is best to interpret high scores as indicating tight and low scores as indicating loose cultures (personal communication, Michele Gelfand, November 11, 2014).
Jeanne M. Brett (jmbrett@kellogg.northwestern.edu) is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. Her research is on culture and negotiation strategy, trust, conflict management and dispute resolution, as well as multicultural teams. She is the author of Negotiating Globally.
Brian Gunia (brian.gunia@jhu.edu) (PhD, Northwestern University) is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. His research focuses on the simple ways that people can help themselves and their colleagues act more ethically and/or negotiate more effectively.
Brosh M. Teucher (PhD, University of Washington) is an assistant professor of business administration and accounting at Saint Michael’s College. His research focuses on management effectiveness and on negotiations in international settings.