Business Negotiation: Styles in Intercultural Dialogue

Negotiating is a part of everyday life, but in business it’s absolutely critical to your success because poor negotiation can lead a company to lose customers. As today’s business world becomes more and more global, it’s very important for employees of an organization to have the intercultural communication skills needed for successful interactions with international collaborators.

Intercultural business communication often includes economic topics, and businessmen in different cultures need to improve the communication skills that could directly lead to successful negotiations with other corporations. Miscommunication may start from small linguistic misunderstandings to serious situations in which agreement may be differently interpreted and its process may be completely different from culture to culture. So, cultural values can influence international business negotiations in significant and unexpected ways from the first to the last stage of a negotiation (Swierczek and Numprasertchai, 2006).
In order to achieve a desirable outcome of a negotiation, it may be useful to follow a structured approach. The first phase is preparation, before any negotiating a decision must be made as to when and where a meeting will be held to discuss an issue. Secondly discussion, the members on each side present their understanding of the situation, the key skills of this step includes the survey, listening and clarification. Thirdly clarification of objectives, the goals and interests of the two sides of disagreement should be clarified to avoid misunderstandings and the risk that can happen. Fourthly negotiate for a win-win result, the parties feel that they have gained something positive during the negotiation phase and both parties believe that their views been taken into account. Fifthly agreement, it can be reached once the understanding of the views and interests of both parties have been taken into account. Lastly an action must be implemented to carry out the decision.

Cultural differences, linguistic differences, geographical distances, temporal differences, legal differences….These specificities may generate some risks, difficulties and costs which must be understood as well as possible in order to make the best conditions for international negotiations.
Culture impacts international negotiations by pushing the two foreign parties to discover and know each other’s culture in advance out of respect, to establish a climate of trust, to know the attitudes to hold during negotiations, to adapt different styles of communication, to minimize differences in meaning, to design terms like planning, engagement, to minimize the risk of errors, wasted time…
Directly or indirectly, culture influences the way in which those negotiators seek to understand and integrate the culture of the other; the way of reasoning; situation analysis; and the search for solutions (Jeswald, 2004).

To illustrate the huge influence of the cultural differences, let’s take the example of a business negotiator from the United States of America who lost a very important agreement because she did not take enough time in order to study and understand in a deep way the context of her Indian counterpart. In fact, the priority in the course of negotiations for the Indian culture is to build a trustworthy environment by establishing a positive and friendly relationship. However, the style of negotiation in the USA puts the light on “getting things done” in an efficient way of using time because “time is money”. Indeed, this direct and transparent style can be perceived as aggressive and offensive, especially by negotiators from cultures where great values are based on relationships. This specific point represents one of the main cultural barriers for the American negotiator who learned from this crucial experience that dealing with business without considering the other’s cultural values and norms can create a cross-cultural misunderstanding and affect negatively the negotiation process (Shonk, 2015).
When negotiating with foreign suppliers, you’ll confront a variety of obstacles, such as unfamiliar laws, ideologies, and governments. One particular obstacle that almost always complicates international negotiations is the cultural differences between the two sides (Cardenas, 2019).

To be an international negotiator, you should have a lot of qualities such as a huge knowledge about the culture of your partners to avoid every misunderstanding during the business negotiation, and also to minimize conflicts and maximize gains. The ability of understanding and adaptability to the differences is an asset, in order to achieve positive results in negotiations.

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