Managers are increasingly called on to negotiate with people from other cultures. Cross-cultural negotiation need not be as frustrating nor as costly as it is often made out to be; it can be a productive and satisfying experience. Which of these outcomes a manager achieves depends in part on the negotiation strategies taken in response to — or better, in anticipation of — the counterpart’s plans and behavior. There are eight culturally responsive strategies for a manager to consider (see Figure 1).1 Clearly, the quality of a negotiation outcome and a manager’s satisfaction with it also depend on how well he or she chooses and implements one of these approaches.
This article presents five steps for selecting a culturally responsive strategy and then offers various tips for implementation, such as making the first move, monitoring feedback, and modifying the approach. These guidelines reflect four basic, ongoing considerations for a strategy: its feasibility for the manager, its fit with the counterpart’s likely approach and therefore its capacity to lead to coherent interaction, its appropriateness to the relationship and circumstances at hand, and its acceptability in light of the manager’s values. There are challenges involved in all of these efforts, and they are pointed out below rather than ignored or belittled, as happens in... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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