chapter8: Global Negotiation

This chapter focused on various aspects of a growing field of negotiation that explores the complexities of negotiation across boarders. The lesson began with the American negotiating styles; both American and non-American perspectives; that American business negotiator have an "arrogant ignorance" that handicaps them when negotiating globally. They are always in hurry, do not understand the role of small talk in building relationship and are too quick to concede in negotiations. Thus the stregths of this styles are friendliness, fairness and honesty, flexible and innovative.
Secondly the lesson examined the results of a research program by John Graham that compared American negotiators with negotiators from other countries. They can negotiated the same level of outcomes on a standard negotiation task. Finally the research suggested that they should use different strategies when negotiating with people from around the world.
We then discussed Salacuse's description of the environment factors that influence global negotiations

• political and legal pluralism
• international economics
• foreign government and bureaucracies
• instability
• ideology
• culture

including one more environmental factor external stakesholder from Phatak and Habib

1)relative bargaining power 2)levels of conflict 3)relationship between negotiators 4)desired outcomes 5)immediate stakesholders. Each of these environment and context factors acsts to make cross-bordernegotiations more difficult. Negotiators need to understand how to manage them. Next, we turned to a discussion of Hofstede's work on culture. This work defines cultures as the shared values and belief held by a group of people, and is the most comprehensive study of cultural dimensions in international business. He concluded that four dimensions could summarize cultural differences:

1. individualism/collectivism
2. power distance
3. musculinity/feminity
4. uncertainty avoidance

We then examined how cultural differences can influence negotiations. Weiss and Stripp suggest that culture can influence global negotiation in several ways, including 1) the definition of negotiation 2) the selection of negotiators 3) protocol 4) communication 5) time 6) risk propensity 7) group versus individuals 8) the natur eof agreements

In conclusion the lesson discussed how to manage cultural differences when negotiating across borders. Weiss present strategies which may be used individually, whereas others are used jointly with the other negotiator. He also indicates thatone critical aspect of choosing the correct strategy for a given negotiation is the degree of familiarity(low, moderate or high) that a negotiator has with the other cultures. However,even those with high familiarity with another culture are faced with a daunting task if they want to modify their strategy completely when they deal with the other culture.