Big Questions for Negotiation and Culture Research

Abstract

On April 12, 2018, at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, we hosted a conference on the frontiers of culture and negotiation research. The conference brought together scholars from two vibrant areas of research-cultural psychology and negotiation-in order to stimulate future research at the intersection of culture and negotiation.For years, these two areas remained isolated from each other: Negotiation research, which developed in the West, tended to ignore culture. Culture research, while global in its scope, tended to ignore negotiation. Back in 2003, we hosted a conference, again at Northwestern, to begin to integrate theory, research, and practice in both fields. We asked pairs of scholars from both culture and negotiation research to write on a topic relevant to both, including basic psychological processes (e.g., cognition, motivation and emotion), the social process (e.g., communication, conflict, and disputing) and the social context (e.g., intergroup relationships, third parties, justice, technology, and social dilemmas) which culminated in the Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (Stanford University Press). Our goals in that volume were to compile an up-to-date review of current knowledge of negotiation, to challenge negotiation theorists to more inclusive of all humankind, and to encourage cultural theorists to provide an explanation for patterns of thought and action in an important area of social interaction. The authors identified numerous knowledge lacuna-opportunities for research for decades to come-and also identified the limits of the Western culture-based findings (Figure 1).

Individual differences in negotiation: A relational process model

“…This term is used interchangeably with characteristic or feature . The characteristics most often studied in negotiation have been sex (Kennedy & Kray, 2015; Mazei et al, 2015), culture (Gelfand & Brett, 2004), and personality traits (Barry & Friedman, 1998).…”

“…That is, the study of person-level effects cannot lose sight of the fact that negotiation is inherently relational. Along these lines, research has examined the interaction effect of same versus other sex dyads (Kray & Thompson, 2005) and same versus other culture dyads (Gelfand & Brett, 2004). Recent work has started to look at the interaction effect of personality traits.…”

Relational business negotiation – propositions based on an interactional perspective

“…The view of negotiation as a process is based on the idea that negotiations are acts of communication between different parties that have different preferences, but are trying to find ways to collaborate and to reach an agreement (Lempereur and Pekar, 2017; Jochemczyk and Nowak, 2010; Butt et al , 2005; Murnighan et al , 1999; Putnam and Roloff, 1992). One way of describing negotiation communication processes in the extant literature is in terms of integrative and distributive processes (Gelfand and Brett, 2004). The idea of integrative and distributive processes is prominent within the field of business negotiation research and is based on a study by Walton and McKersie (1965), who suggested that a negotiation process consists of four sub-processes: distributive bargaining, integrative bargaining, attitudinal bargaining and intra-organizational bargaining.…”

Dementia across cultural borders : Reflections and thought patterns of elderly Iranians with dementia in Sweden, their relatives and staff at a culturally profiled nursing home

“…Cultural transition could be a self-motivated and active construction performed by individuals, and negotiation as an ongoing process (Gelfand & Brett, 2004). Understanding cultural transition is a central requirement in understanding negotiation, as it may indicate a negotiator's tendency to think that negotiation is primarily a process of building, reconstructing and maintaining relationships, or a process of distributing resources.…”