Negotiating Across Cultures

Global business management issues and concerns are complex, diverse, changing, and often intractable. Industry actors and policy makers alike rely upon partnerships and alliances for developing and growing sustainable business organizations and ventures. As a result, global business leaders must be well-versed in managing and leading multidimensional human relationships and business networks – requiring skill and expertise in conducting the negotiation processes that these entail. After laying out a foundation justifying the importance of studying negotiation in a global context, this book will detail conventional and contemporary theories regarding international engagement, culture, cultural difference, and cross-cultural interaction, with particular focus on their influence on negotiation. Building on these elements, the book will provide a broad array of country-specific chapters, each describing and analyzing the negotiation culture of businesspeople in a different country around the world. Finally, the book will look ahead, with an eye towards identifying and anticipating new trends and developments in the field of global negotiation. This text will appeal to scholars and researchers in international business, cross-cultural studies, and conflict management who seek to understand the challenges of intercultural communication and negotiation. It will provide trainers and consultants with the insights they need to prepare their clients for intercultural negotiation. Finally, the text will appeal to businesspeople who find themselves heading out to engage with counterparts in another country, or operating in other multinational environments on a regular basis.

In the global marketplace, negotiation frequently takes place across cultural boundaries, yet negotiation theory has traditionally been grounded in Western culture. This book, which provides an in-depth review of the field of negotiation theory, expands current thinking to include cross-cultural perspectives. The contents of the book reflect the diversity of negotiation—research-negotiator cognition, motivation, emotion, communication, power and disputing, intergroup relationships, third parties, justice, technology, and social dilemmas—and provides new insight into negotiation theory, questioning assumptions, expanding constructs, and identifying limits not apparent from working exclusively within one culture. The book is organized in three sections and pairs chapters on negotiation theory with chapters on culture. The first part emphasizes psychological processes—cognition, motivation, and emotion. Part II examines the negotiation process. The third part emphasizes the social context of negotiation. A final chapter synthesizes the main themes of the book to illustrate how scholars and practitioners can capitalize on the synergy between culture and negotiation research.

Presenting a universal set of techniques and people skills that will allow you to adapt quickly to, and thrive in, any cultural environment, this book will show you how to discard your own culturally based assumptions and pay careful attention to cues in cross-cultural situations. --

When it was first published in 2001, Negotiating Globally quickly became the basic reference for managers who needed to learn how to negotiate successfully across boundaries of national culture. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition preserves the structure of the acclaimed first edition and improves upon it, making it even easier to learn how to navigate national culture when negotiating deals, resolving disputes, and making decisions in teams. Rather than offering country-specific protocol and customs, Negotiating Globally provides a general framework to help negotiators anticipate and manage cultural differences. This new edition incorporates the lessons of the latest research with new emphasis on executing a negotiation strategy and negotiating conflict in multicultural teams. The well-received chapter on “Government At and Around the Table” has been expanded and updated with new examples that span the globe. In this comprehensive resource, Jeanne M. Brett describes how to develop a negotiation planning document and shows how to execute the plan. She provides a model that explains how the cultural environment affects negotiators’ interests, priorities, and strategies. She provides benchmarks for distinguishing good deals from poor ones and good negotiators from poor ones. The book explains how resolving disputes is different from making deals and how negotiation strategy can be used in multicultural teams. Negotiating Globally challenges negotiators to expand their repertoire of strategies so that they will be able to close deals, resolve disputes, and get teams to make decisions.

Intended for negotiators and students of negotiation who seek to understand the principles and processes of cross-cultural negotiation and develop effective strategies for negotiating in different cultures. This book about strategic negotiation across cultures examines the negotiations of US multinational companies in China, Japan, and India.

From high-level business negotiations to casual conversations among friends, every interpersonal interaction is shaped by cultural norms and expectations. Seldom is this more clearly brought to light than in encounters between people from different cultural backgrounds, when dissimilar communication practices may lead to frustration and misunderstanding. This thought-provoking text presents a new framework for understanding the impact of culture on communication and for helping students build intercultural communication competence. With illustrative examples from around the globe, the book shows that verbal and nonverbal communication involves much more than transmitting a particular message--it also reflects each participant's self-image, group identifications and values, and privacy and relational needs. Readers learn to move effectively and appropriately through a wide range of transcultural situations by combining culture-specific knowledge with mindful listening and communication skills. Throughout, helpful tables and charts and easy-to-follow guidelines for putting concepts into practice enhance the book's utility for students.

Culture and Negotiation was the outcome of cooperation between UNESCO and IIASA. The cultural factors bearing on international negotiations are a topic of importance, not least in the environmental field. The book's strength is its combination of a lucid and comprehensive discussion of issues and concepts with a series of case studies concerning specific rivers and the people who live and produce on their banks and tributaries. The result throws interesting light on the cultural parameters of human agreement and discord, and offers useful, practical pointers for the art of negotiation.