InterNeg Seminars

10:30 AM, May 14, 2008 Room GM 725
J. Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal

Cultural Impact on Concession Triggering Behavior Content Analysis Methodology

Wan-Jung Lin

Ever since the boom in global e-business and the resulting severe competition, cross-cultural e-negotiation has apparently been increasing. Understanding how culture affects negotiation is becoming more and more critical. Culture is a system that shapes persons values, norms and identities. Further, due to the conflict nature of negotiation, concession is of the essence for reaching agreements. Therefore, to understand what kinds of behaviours will trigger a counterpart's concession effectively will help negotiators to improve their negotiation skills. The purpose of this research is to explore what kinds of messages will encourage the counterpart to make concessions and how the counterpart's cultural background will moderate it. It emphasizes the dyadic negotiation behaviour. In other words, the exploration focuses on the behavioural relationship between the negotiator and his counterpart. Content analysis is adopted for this research. The result indicates that, for different cultural dyads, the counterpart's concession behavior was stimulated by the negotiator's exchanged messages. Based on these findings, negotiators may gain some useful insights into what kinds of behaviours are useful for encouraging the counterpart's concession behaviour.

Wan-Jung Lin, Ph.D. student, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. Wan-Jung has been visiting the InterNeg centre since August of 2007.