Culture and Negotiation
FIGURE 2 I Cultural Prototypes and Cultural Stereotypes
M5
Culture I
Culture 2
N2 Nl
Figure 2 may help you to visualize the meaning of each of the traps. Each bell curve in Figure 2 illustrates a different culture's distribution on a psychological characteristic. The lines dropped from the height of the curve illustrate the cultural prototype. Note that there is a distribution around each culture's prototype and each distribution has "tails." Also notice that there are plenty of members from both cultures in the central, overlap¬ping region of the curves. Not everyone in Culture 2 is more extreme on the cultural variable than everyone in Culture 1. In fact, Nl, a negotiator from Culture I, is actually closer to the Culture 2 prototype than N2, a negotiator from Culture 2. These cultural overlaps help explain why psychological elements of culture measured at the individual level do not predict negotiation behaviors or other types of outcomes.
So why bother studying psychological characteristics of culture if you cannot see them, if they do not characterize everyone in the culture, and if, at least at the individual level, they do not predict negotiation outcomes very well, if at all? Even though psychological charac¬teristics are below the surface of the cultural iceberg, you often can see them reflected in the culture's institutional ideology and in the patterns of behavior characteristic of people from that culture. Even though not every cultural member is going to be like the cultural proto¬type, because of the nature of the bell curve, more cultural members will fall under the cen¬tral bell than in the tails of the curve. This means that unless a culture is extremely heterogeneous (the curve is very flat), anyone you negotiate with is more likely to come from the cultural center than from the tails. In addition, knowing cultural prototypes helps you anticipate the other party's interests as you prepare your planning document. It also helps you anticipate their likely strategic behaviors as you make your own strategic choices.
Cultural Values
A value is a judgment of what is important in social interaction. A cultural value is a judgment shared by a group. National cultures differ in terms of shared values. Two such differences seem particularly important for negotiations: individualism versus collec¬tivism and hierarchy versus egalitarianism. (However, other value continuums—such as a focus on traditional ways versus openness to change—may account for national cul¬tural differences in particular negotiations.)
Individualism versus Collectivism The continuum individualism versus collectivism distinguishes between cultures that generally place individuals' interests above those of the collective and cultures that generally place collective needs above those of individuals.
In individualist cultures social, economic, and legal institutions promote the autonomy of individuals, reward individual accomplishment, and protect individual rights. In collective cultures institutions promote interdependency of individuals with the others in their families, work establishments, and communities by emphasizing social obligations. Indi¬vidual accomplishment reflects back on others with whom the individual is interdepen¬dent. Legal institutions support collective interests above individual interests.
Research generally categorizes nations in North America (excluding Mexico) and Western Europe as individualist cultures and pretty much the rest of the world as more or less collective, especially East Asia and Latin America. No one has studied Africa.
Coming from a culture that is high on individualism or high on collectivism may affect negotiators' interests, goals, and so on—elements of their planning as well as their strategic choices. For example, individualistic cultures promote and condone self-interest, which may be reflected in negotiators' targets and their strategic use of argument; collective cultures' emphasis on social obligations may be reflected in negotiators' choices for indirect confrontation and face saving.
An example illustrates that there are cultural differences in negotiation strategy even between cultures that are in many ways similar. A U.S. software engineer working on a project for an Israeli client reported how much he was challenged by the different ways of approaching issues and discussing them: "There is something pretty common to the Israeli culture, they like to argue. I tend to try and collaborate more, and it got very stressful for me until I figured out how to kind of merge the cultures."
According to my own research, Israeli managers are more likely to have individu¬alistic social motives than are managers from any other culture I have studied.
However, you may find much less in this book about individualism versus collec¬tivism than you might have expected, considering that this is the cultural value most widely studied by psychologists. Although some commentators claim that the difference between individualism and collectivism influences basic psychological processes, these same commentators admit "the empirical basis for this conclusion is not as firm as might be desired." Even in the 2004 Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (edited by Michele Gelfand and yours truly), individualism versus collectivism dominates the chapters on culture. But a review of the research cited in these chapters attempting to link individualism versus collectivism to negotiation processes and outcomes is disap¬pointing. In the negotiation contexts of deal making, dispute resolution, and negotiating decisions in multicultural teams. I simply do not see evidence of a link, beyond a possible difference in the level of self-interest and concern for relationships. Only in the negotia¬tion context of social dilemmas is there clear research evidence of an effect associated with individualistic versus collective cultural differences. In social dilemmas, people from collective cultures are more cooperative than those from individualist cultures.
In sum, the cultural value of considering individualism versus collectivism does not give us a great deal of leverage in understanding culture's effects on negotiation. This may be because individualism and collectivism do not act in isolation from other ele¬ments of culture. Psychological culture is an amalgam of values, beliefs, norms, and knowledge structures. Just knowing that a culture is more or less individualistic does not tell us enough to do more than make very general statements about likely behavior in negotiations. We have to look at more elements of culture.
Hierarchy versus Egalitarianism The continuum hierarchy versus egalitarianism dis¬tinguishes between cultures that are differentiated into closed and inflexible social ranks and cultures in which social structure is relatively flat, open, and malleable. In hierar¬chical cultures, social status determines social power, and social power generally trans¬fers across situations. In egalitarian cultures, social boundaries are more permeable, and social status may be both short-lived and variable across situations.
Western cultures, especially Northern European nations, tend to be egalitarian. As you move south in Europe and on to Africa and south from North America to Central and South America, culture tends to be more hierarchical. Asian cultures are usually classified as hierarchical.
In a study of multicultural teams, Kristin Behfar, Mary Kern, and I found that hier¬archical-egalitarian value differences were a pervasive challenge, in some cases limiting some team members' participation in negotiating team decisions. A manager reared in India told us about being on a team that was trying to standardize a process across a U.S. company's sites in Belgium, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. He said, "In India, if you had a senior business person [on the team], just by age you would give them more respect and the reporting relationships [would stay] pretty much intact [even when on a team together]. You don't call your director by his first name. You usually refer to him as Sir XYZ. And I think the people in Mexico are also like that to a large extent. I felt like they also watch very carefully what they say in terms of who they address and how they say it and how forceful they are.... But I think that's asking a little too much of the
Americans----their reporting relationships are still there, but when you're in a meeting
they usually consider everybody as an equal.. .."
In hierarchical cultures, the reluctance to confront higher-status people may stem from concern for maintaining and using social hierarchies. When conflict does occur in hierarchical cultures, the conflict is more likely to be handled indirectly by a social superior than by direct confrontation. When a higher-status third party gets involved in a dispute, that party's decision reinforces its authority without one party having to con¬cede to the other, hence losing social status. In contrast, in an egalitarian culture, success in direct negotiations can lead to differentiated status, but not likely to permanent changes in social status, since a negotiated agreement in an egalitarian culture is un¬likely to be an avenue for setting precedents.
Within hierarchical cultures, social relations are bound by a web of responsibil¬ities and obligations that are mostly absent from egalitarian cultures. For example, in hierarchical cultures, social inferiors are expected to defer to social superiors, who in return for the power and privilege conferred on them by right of their status have an obligation to look out for the well-being of lower-status parties. No such obligations exist in egalitarian cultures. In the 1990s, for example, Rubbermaid (now Newell Rubbermaid) was the leading brand-name maker of plastic kitchenware and house¬hold items such as laundry baskets, yet definitely of lower business status than Wa