First, we investigate intercultural team composition and its impact on negotiation processes and economic outcomes of
intercultural B2B negotiation settings. We thus extend the finding that negotiators with high levels of collectivism use
more integrative and less distributive strategies in intercultural and team-level negotiation settings (Hypotheses 1 and 2).
Team culture affects team negotiation strategies, and collectivistic teams are more (less) prone to use integrative
(distributive) strategies. In essence, our study shows that the ‘‘collectivism effect’’ on negotiation behavior in individual
settings is valid for seller teams too. This finding validates the logic of the additive composition model (e.g., Ahearne et al.,
2010).
Second, we add a new perspective to literature on intercultural negotiations, by analyzing the roles of cultural
moderators in seller teams (Hypotheses 3 and 4). We find that a cultural moderator does not always make a negotiation
process more integrative. Cultural moderators are not a panacea; they must be employed thoughtfully, depending on a
company’s negotiation goal. At the same time, cultural moderators always help reach better economic outcomes,
independent of their cultural background. Both the seller teams’ individual profit and the joint profit with the buyer
increase.
Third, Brett and Okumura (1998) show that intracultural negotiations reach higher joint gains than intercultural
negotiations. Although we focus on intercultural negotiations, the inclusion of a cultural moderator leads to a setting
somewhere in between intra- and intercultural. As such, we extend Brett’s and Okumura’s finding to culturally mixed teams,
and we cite individual profit as a different outcome measure. Graham and Mintu-Wimsatt (1997) investigated intracultural
negotiations and showed that the effect of a problem-solving approach (which relates to integrative behavior) on outcomes
is conditional on the negotiator’s cultural background. Our study did not disclose an unconditionally beneficial effect of
integrative negotiation behavior on outcomes, but we showed how cultural background affects the use of integrative
strategies and thus extended the analysis to intercultural settings.