Culture-Based Negotiation Styles
In an anonymous article, a Japanese writer describes United States negotiators as hard to understand. One of the reasons for this, we are told, is because "unlike Japanese, the Americans are not racially or culturally homogenous."[1] While it is difficult to characterize any national or cultural approach to negotiation, generalizations are frequently drawn. These generalizations are helpful to the extent that the reader remembers that they are only guides, not recipes. Any generalization holds true or not depending on many contextual factors including time, setting, situation, stakes, history between the parties, nature of the issue, individual preferences, interpersonal dynamics and mood.
Any generalization will apply to some members of a group some of the time. This is best seen by considering generalizations about groups to which you belong. If you hear that women or men tend to negotiate in this way, or Americans in another way, what effect does it have on you as a member of these groups? If you want to answer, "Actually, it depends," you are among the majority, for most of us resist easy categorization and broad classifications. At the same time, it can be useful to back up and attempt to see ourselves and others from a distance so that the patterns and habits that define what is "normal" in negotiation can be examined for what they are: culturally bound and culturally defined common sense.
In this essay, some generalizations about cultural and national approaches to negotiation will be outlined. These may help negotiators and mediators prepare for negotiations by raising the kinds of differences that occur across cultures, and pointing out possible pitfalls of lack of attention to cultural factors. They should be taken as a series of starting points rather than definitive descriptions, since cultural groups are too diverse and changing contexts too influential to be described reliably.
Before outlining these generalizations, a caveat: most of the ways of studying culture, communication, and negotiation are derived largely from Western concepts. When a U.S. or Western European instrument to measure assertiveness in negotiation is translated into Japanese, for example, it retains Western assumptions about the nature of assertiveness. A Japanese idea of assertiveness that included avoidance as an adaptive and appropriate strategy could be easily missed, labeled as unassertive because of cultural assumptions about the natures of assertion and avoidance. Because of the lack of good studies that take an intercultural approach (using a variety of starting points and currencies in developing the research itself and a multicultural team to carry it out), the generalizations that follow are limited. More research is being done on culture-specific approaches by insiders of various non-Western cultures, and some intercultural research is also being conducted -- these should be carefully examined as they become available.
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