دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله فرهنگ و راهبرد مذاکره (نشریه امرالد 2017)

فرهنگ و راهبرد مذاکره

Culture and negotiation strategy

The model shows two negotiators from different cultures. Culture refers to the unique character of a group. When we are studying culture and negotiation strategy we often use national boundaries as cultural boundaries. Culture in this case is the values and norms and beliefs characteristic of the people from that nation and the political, economic, legal systems that provide structure of social interaction there. From a purely behavioral perspective, culture provides functional solutions to problems of social interaction. This means that people in different cultures resolve the problems of social interaction, for example negotiation, somewhat differently. You can find people using the same negotiation strategies in every culture, but the emphasis varies. People in different cultures rely primarily on different negotiation strategies.

“Rely primarily” translates into there is a cultural central tendency for use of negotiation strategy. By no means everyone in a culture follows the same norms or holds the same values or negotiates exactly the same way. Culture is not deterministic; there is variation around the cultural central tendency. This degree of variation is called cultural tightness-looseness (Gelfand et al, 2011). In tight cultures, there are strong social norms guiding interpersonal behavior, social monitoring of that behavior, and sanctioning of deviations. Cultural tightness reduces behavioral variation. Loose cultures have social norms, but in loose cultures conformity is up to the individual and there is a greater variety of behavior; improvisation is common in loose cultures.

Understanding the defining features of a culture is useful simply because those features describe what is normative in a culture. When you see behavior that is consistent with the central tendency, you can label it as cultural behavior. And when you label people’s behavior as cultural, even if from your own perspective that behavior is dysfunctional, you can understand that the behavior is deepseated and will be difficult to change. In general, people from loose cultures will have an easier time and people from tight cultures will have a more difficult time adjusting to social interaction across cultural boundaries. But across cultures, culturally intelligent people – those who see others’ behaviors in cultural terms –work effectively with people from other cultures, because they respect cultural differences and develop creative ways of managing them (Ang, Van Dyne, Koh et al., 2007).

The model shows that negotiators’ cultures affect their interests and priorities and the strategies that they bring to the negotiation table. Interests refer to the reasons why negotiators take the positions they do. Interests answer the question, why are you asking me for that? Priorities refer to the relative importance to each negotiator of the different issues to be negotiated. Negotiation strategy is a set of goal-directed behaviors that people use when trying to reach agreement in negotiations. Just as people around the world solve the problem of greeting differently – some kiss, some bow, some shake hands, they also solve the problem of negotiating differently. To be an effective negotiator in a global environment requires knowing your own and having strategy to learn about the counterpart’s interests and priorities.