When faced with adverse situations in exchange relationships, the people involved are required to respond. Response strategies are reactions to such adverse situations and represent cognitive schemata organized in an integrated structure forming a mental map. Extant response strategy research implicitly assumes that the content and internal structure of response strategies is universal, but with few exceptions, it fails to assess cross-cultural validity, a necessary step to investigate potential cultural variations in response strategy preferences. This study has investigated the cross-cultural validity of a circumplex model in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, and Japan. The seven response strategies examined attained measurement equivalence, and six were organized in an equivalent circumplex structure in all four countries. The findings also revealed cross-cultural differences in people's preference to use response strategies. This study therefore contributes to the cross-cultural psychology literature by demonstrating that response strategy content and structure are nearly universal, whereas preferences for using response strategies vary across cultures.

International strategic alliances have grown increasingly popular in recent decades, yet their failure rate is extremely high. Poor management of adverse situations contributes significantly to such high failure rates. Moreover, the international environments in which international strategic alliances operate exacerbate the adverse situations and make their management more critical.However, extant research does not specify how people from different national cultures respond to these adverse situations. In order to better understand cross-national differences, this study investigates future managers' preferences for specific response strategies in an international strategic alliance experimental context. Using a scenario-based experiment with 1,379 business students in five countries-Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom-the authors assess whether preferences for seven response strategies-exit, opportunism, aggressive voice, creative voice, considerate voice, patience, and neglect-vary across countries. The results indicate that national culture, both directly and interactively through relationship-level exchange variables that characterize the adversity of the situation, influences response strategy preference. This study advances literature on response strategies by explaining that when faced with the same adverse situation, future managers from different countries likely prefer different response strategies, depending on which response strategies they believe are most adequate in their cultural environment.

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