Logics and Logistics for Future Research: Appropriately Interpreting the Emotional Landscape of Multicultural Negotiation

Abstract

To invigorate future teaching and research, this article discusses theoretical approaches and empirical opportunities to better understand emotional dynamics in negotiation settings across cultural contexts. We adopt a culturally informed logic of appropriateness (Kopelman, 2009) to shed light on emerging and underexplored topics in this domain. The goal of this article is to inspire scholars worldwide to engage in rigorous empirical investigations of the antecedents, consequences, mechanisms, boundary conditions, and evidence-based strategies in the combined domain of negotiation, culture, and emotion through research, teaching, and practice.Advancing cultural competence in negotiation necessitates a nuanced understanding of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors reflect systems of beliefs, values, and norms characteristic of groups of people. To invigorate future teaching and research of negotiation across diverse cultural contexts, this article draws on existing theoretical frameworks and empirical findings of emotion in these settings to highlight key areas for innovative future research. At the Culture and Negotiation Conference in April of 2018, sponsored by the Dispute Resolution Research Center (DRRC) of the Kellogg School of Management (see Gelfand and Brett, 2019), we designed and facilitated a session that brought together junior and senior colleagues passionate to collectively brainstorm ideas about the future of negotiation, culture, and emotion research. Drawing on the expertise of participants, our goal was to formulate novel practice-oriented research questions. The success of this article, which captures the theoretical foundations and essence of our discussion, hinges on you, the reader, being inspired to innovate as you engage in negotiation, culture, and emotion scholarship, whether through research, teaching, or practice.In this article, we first ground our discussion at the intersection of negotiation, culture, and emotion scholarship. We demonstrate that research accounting for all three domains in tandem is a nascent and promising area of research. Furthermore, we articulate theoretical assumptions that may help us better We thank the participants at the Kellogg DRRC conference on culture and negotiation held in April of 2018 for collaborating to develop the research questions articulated in this manuscript. We are grateful to Jeanne Brett and Michele Gelfand for convening the conference and energizing scholars to generate discussions that challenge us to expand negotiation research and practice globally. We appreciate the editorial guidance of Michael Gross and the NCMR editorial team, as well as our colleagues who provided feedback and insights that helped us develop this article:

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