Culture Based Negotitation Style

Derrick Jones

MT302 Organizational Behavior

Unit-7 Assignment

Culture Bases Negotiation Styles

June 4, 2012

While it is difficult to characterize any national or cultural approach to negotiation, generalization is frequently drawn. These generalizations are helpful to the extent that the reader remembers that they are only guides not recipes. It depends on many contextual factors including time, setting, situation, stakes, and history between the parties, nature of issue, individual preferences, interpersonal dynamics, and mood (Anonymous. Negotiating with the Americans. Disseminated by James T. Felicita, head of contract systems for NASA Systems Divisions, Hughes Aircraft Co. March 1986).

In negotiating deals with Americans, the negotiators tend to rely on individualist values. They always have a competitive to their approach to negotiate, they are energetic, confident, and persistent; they enjoy arguing their positions, concentrate on one problem at a time, focus on areas of disagreement instead of areas of commonality or agreement, and like closure and certainty rather than open-endedness, All of this depends on who the Americans are you are talking about (U.S Approach to Negotiations).

Japan Negotiators are known for their politeness, their emphasis on establishing relationships, and their indirect use power (Graham, Suno, and March. Negotiating Behaviors in Ten Foreign Cultures. Management Science. Vol. 40(1), January 1994). Japanese concern with face and face-savings is one reason that politeness is so important and confrontation is avoided. They tend to use power in muted, indirect ways consistent with their preference for harmony and calm. Studies show that Japanese negotiators were found to disclose considerably less about themselves and their goals than Americans (Nakanish, Massayuki, and Kenneth M. Johnson, and Weisman, Richard L. and Jolene Koester, 1993).

So in handling a negotiator from Japan versus an American negotiator, I would first...