Negotiation
Introduction
Negotiation is commonly observed in one’s daily life, it could be a bargaining process between organizations, or resolving a conflict with your neighbour. Basically negotiation is a communication process for two or more parties to get to an agreement. Managing cross-cultural negotiation should be thoughtful about each party’s culture differences, which could be assessed in three domains, communication effectiveness, negotiation strategy and the agreement been achieved. In this article, I’ll analyse how culture differences affect each domain and process outcomes, by combining my study and inter-cultural experience, then advices will be given in how good performance could be achieved when acting on the implications of cultural differences for negotiation by individual and organizations.
Cross-cultural Communication
Communication is the act of transmitting messages, including information about the nature of the relationship, to another person who interprets these messages and gives them meaning. Successful communication requires not only that the message is transmitted but also the meaning of the message is understood (Thomas, D.C. & Peterson, 2014). In cross-cultural negotiation, to ensure the message being exchanged equally and more easily, one negotiation language should be chosen, and English is usually used in those formal situations, which might force at least one party to use their second language. Of course strong bilingual skills(or translator) were needed but cultural differences exist even between English speakers and affect the effectiveness of communication.
As shown in Figure 1, cultural difference could affect how the message sender encodes opinions into message; the way of interpreting the message is also affected by the receiver’s culture. Given that the bigger cultural distance between message sender and receiver, the less amount of common culture (knowledge, expectation, value) to help them encoding or decoding the message
Negotiation is commonly observed in one’s daily life, it could be a bargaining process between organizations, or resolving a conflict with your neighbour. Basically negotiation is a communication process for two or more parties to get to an agreement. Managing cross-cultural negotiation should be thoughtful about each party’s culture differences, which could be assessed in three domains, communication effectiveness, negotiation strategy and the agreement been achieved. In this article, I’ll analyse how culture differences affect each domain and process outcomes, by combining my study and inter-cultural experience, then advices will be given in how good performance could be achieved when acting on the implications of cultural differences for negotiation by individual and organizations.
Cross-cultural Communication
Communication is the act of transmitting messages, including information about the nature of the relationship, to another person who interprets these messages and gives them meaning. Successful communication requires not only that the message is transmitted but also the meaning of the message is understood (Thomas, D.C. & Peterson, 2014). In cross-cultural negotiation, to ensure the message being exchanged equally and more easily, one negotiation language should be chosen, and English is usually used in those formal situations, which might force at least one party to use their second language. Of course strong bilingual skills(or translator) were needed but cultural differences exist even between English speakers and affect the effectiveness of communication.
As shown in Figure 1, cultural difference could affect how the message sender encodes opinions into message; the way of interpreting the message is also affected by the receiver’s culture. Given that the bigger cultural distance between message sender and receiver, the less amount of common culture (knowledge, expectation, value) to help them encoding or decoding the message