Globalisation has so challenged the relevance of culture that its role is again being questioned. So what does this mean for cross-cultural negotiators?

Culture counts

Finding a common tongue, literally and metaphorically, is a corporate must

After years of spreading the gospel, the word was out and accepted: working, studying or just plain traveling beyond one's borders required an expectation for and an understanding of behaviours that would be different from those encountered at home.

In short, culture mattered.  And in just about every area of human activity, if it crossed cultures, it seemed that cultural differences had to be factored into the equation, as a new and vital consideration for success.

This, of course, included the process of negotiating: no longer could we seek objective truths about good and bad negotiating in a cultural vacuum, for once we negotiated across cultures, cultural differences would certainly affect those truths.

Recognising the different ways that different cultures negotiated became an important global skill.

How important is culture now?

In just a few short years, however, globalisation has so challenged the relevance of culture that its role is again being questioned, albeit for new and different reasons.  If we are all speaking English, more or less, does culture matter? If we are all doing business by a global set of rules, more or less, does culture matter? If global corporate culture is in fact more powerful than local national culture, does culture matter?

Predictably, the old questions regarding cross-cultural negotiations have also re-surfaced: do cultural differences really matter when negotiating in a world already so globally interconnected?

Do cultural differences really affect the processes of negotiations?  Has the mantra of multiculturalism receded to just a dull background drone in the face of what really goes on at the global negotiating table?

From Newton to Einstein

Let's get in a time machine and travel not too far back to a world where the concept of investigating 'negotiations' was a new idea.  This was a world premised on enlightened scientific rationalism, where we could hope to investigate a concern like negotiating, and expect our efforts to yield certain principles, methods or laws about what works and what doesn't when human beings negotiate.

Significant scientific research did produce some very valuable principles, laws and methods in regard to effective and ineffective negotiating, and something of a science of negotiating came into being.  However, in many ways, this research mirrored its time, with the end-product being 'universals' about negotiating which were true only to a point, that point being the 'real world' of multiculturalism.

Suddenly, these 'truths' about negotiating, when applied cross-culturally, had to be adjusted, for what may have been true in the culture in which they were researched, was no longer the case when moved abroad.  This pre-global world of categories, principles and laws unaffected by cultural differences now had to become, in the multicultural global world, more like guiding frameworks or perspectives from which to look at negotiating, but which needed to be bent, changed, re-defined, from time to time and place to place, depending upon the actual people involved.

The scientific investigation of negotiating moved from an attempt to discover a perfect mechanistic set of truths to accepting the messy notion of cultural relativism: in short, it moved from a Newtonian pre-global world to a global 'Einsteinian' world where culture made all the former rules relative. 

The original Ten Commandments

So what were those seminal scientific negotiating truths?  And how did we have to adjust them according to cultural requirements?  For starters, we learned that there were essential elements to the process of negotiating: all negotiations, for example, involved considering the following elements:

• Values: these are non-negotiable beliefs, often used as justifications for one's position, and they must be understood, respected, and deflected, in order to focus on the priority needs at the table.
• Positions: these are typically the stated objectives of one side; they may or may not reflect priority interests.
• Underlying priority needs: these are often the true requirements that one side has, but may or may not be put forward clearly or immediately.
• A requirement for re-framing: almost all negotiations must be reframed away from values and positions to underlying priority needs, in order for success to be perceived by both sides.
• A search for alternative solutions: this is the creative problem-solving process that is the hallmark of a successful negotiation.

Additionally, most all negotiations apparently move through several stages, beginning with:

• Virtual-sharing: a period of relationship-building, where substantive issues are typically not brought forward.
• Positioning: typically that time in a negotiation where positions are revealed and challenged.
• Problem-solving: typically the end of the negotiation where objections to positions and values are overcome and a search for the satisfaction of priority needs occurs.

And finally, all negotiations generally occur within a climate that is either collaborative (win-win) or competitive (win/lose).

Skilled negotiators master a set of behaviours that allows them to skilfully manage all of these elements to their advantage, while novice negotiators, or those unaware of these issues, tend to be less successful at the negotiating table, because they are less skilled at understanding and managing these issues. 

Enter the cultural anthropologists

And what were the cultural considerations that had to be factored into the negotiations equation once the scientific research met the global world?

Essentially, that values were often culturally based, that culture affected the degree to which negotiators would put forward positions or reveal underlying needs, that certain cultures were more or less pre-disposed or not to search for alternative solutions, that the speed and degree to which negotiations moved through their particular stages was also highly dependent upon culture.

Perhaps most importantly, we learned that culture played a significant role in determining whether or not the negotiation would proceed in a collaborative or competitive climate, and whether the expected outcome would be win/win or win/lose. These differences were the result of the influence of cultural values, which cultural anthropologists categorised as follows:

• Status/hierarchy versus egality orientation: the degree to which a culture saw greater value in organisation and structure or efficiency and access
• Individualistic versus other-dependent orientation: the degree to which a culture saw greater value in independent action or group consensus
• Relationship versus rule orientation: the degree to which a culture saw greater value in personal relationships or the universal application of rules
• Monochronic versus polychronic time orientation: the degree to which a culture saw greater value in organising and compartmentalising time and activity or not
• Risk-comfort versus risk-avoidant orientation: the degree to which a culture saw greater value in taking risk or moving cautiously
• Past versus future orientation: the degree to which a culture would emphasise past accomplishments or future possibilities
• High versus low context orientation: the degree to which a culture saw greater value in communicating implicitly or explicitly
• Process versus results orientation: the degree to which a culture emphasised detail and process or end result
• Formal versus informal orientation: the degree to which a culture valued protocols and formalities or not

At the negotiating table, this meant that we saw culture's influence on the negotiation process specifically in a number of areas:

• The Basic Concept of the Negotiation: Win/lose? Win/win?  Collaborative or Competitive?  This set the tone and affects the climate and the degree to which the climate can be changed or not.
• The Selection of the Negotiators:  Based on what criteria?  Status?  Gender or age?  Rank?  Family association? Or competency, previous experience or qualifications?
• The Importance of Protocol: What traditions and customs do we need to follow?  How do we greet each other?  Where do we sit?  Do we negotiate over meals?
• The Style of Communications: Is non-verbal important?  How do we confirm understanding?  How do we communicate disagreement?
• The Value of Time: Is time manipulated?  Is an agenda iron-clad?  Do meetings start and end "on time"?  How long should the negotiation take?
• Risk-taking propensity:  Who can say what and to whom and when?  How much information needs to be shared and with whom before progress is made?
• Decision-making:  Is it done by a group or by an individual?  Do we need total consensus?  Majority?  Who makes the decision, an individual, or several people?  Are all the decision-makers at the table?
• The Final Nature of the Agreement: Is it a legal tome?  A short memorandum of understanding?  Or is it a handshake?

Part II looks at how complex negotiating at the post-global table has become, and discusses the factors that even skilled negotiators need to be aware of to be successful in a post-global world.

Dean Foster is president of Dean Foster Associates. He can be contacted through its European head office at: info@dfa-europe.com, +32 (0) 87 77 68 66, www.learnaboutcultures.com

He has written the four-part Global Etiquette Guide book series (which include ‘The Global Etiquette Guide to: Europe – Asia – Latin America – Africa & the Middle East), and the book 'Bargaining Across Borders'.