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Faculty
Bookshelf: The Handbook of Negotiations and Culture
Minding
the culture gap
Kellogg
Professor Jeanne Brett’s new book on negotiation points
up the importance of knowing who you’re dealing with
across the table
by
Deborah Leigh Wood
By its
very title, The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture
(Stanford University Press) implies that culture is an integral
part of negotiation. The truth is, some people still need
to be persuaded, which is the purpose of the book, says its
co-editor, Jeanne
M. Brett, DeWitt W. Buchanan Jr. Distinguished Professor
of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School.
“We wanted
to show that you can’t ignore culture when trying to
understand what negotiators do,” says Brett, who is
director of the Kellogg Dispute Resolution Research Center.
“Understanding culture is essential when negotiating
across national boundaries, as well as when assessing the
party on the other side of the same-culture negotiating table.”
The book was published
this summer and offers an in-depth survey of the negotiation
landscape.
Brett believes
that negotiation theory, which traditionally has been grounded
in Western culture, ignores the often strikingly different
customs peculiar to other cultures. For example, “Westerners
frequently will reveal a great deal about their own positions
in negotiations, trusting the other party to reciprocate,”
she says. “Asians, however, tend to be much more reticent
to reveal information, and trust has to be built on a foundation
of benevolent behavior.” Brett says more information
stemming from a cross-cultural perspective will come to light
as research into the social psychology of negotiation and
culture gains momentum.
When working on
the text with co-editor Michele J. Gelfand, associate professor
of psychology at the University of Maryland, Brett says they
tried to “gather scholars who do excellent negotiation
research and subtly expose them to the cultural biases hidden
in that research.”
The book’s
structure reflects its editors’ mission: Chapters on
traditional negotiation theory are paired with chapters on
the cultures relevant to that theory. The book covers psychological
processes such as cognition, motivation and emotion; the negotiation
process; and the social context of negotiation. Topics include
motivation, power and disputing as well as intergroup relationships,
third parties, justice, technology and social dilemmas.
In addition
to Brett, the Kellogg School is well represented in the book
with essays by David
Messick, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics
and Decision in Management; Leigh
Thompson, the J. Jay Gerber Distinguished Professor of
Dispute Resolution and Organizations; and Margaret Neale,
former Kellogg School professor. Kellogg alumni also contributed
a number of essays: Wendi Lyn Adair, Zoe I. Barsness, Shirli
Kopelman, Kathleen L. McGinn, Debra L. Shapiro, Catherine
H. Tinsley, J. Mark Weber and Laurie R. Weingart all appear
in the book.
Messick writes
about a common social dilemma, the fundamental conflict between
the short-term interests of individuals and the longer-term
interests of the groups of which they’re a part. He
and Weber examine how individuals balance their idiosyncratic
agendas and values against those of the larger context in
which they find themselves. In the paired chapter, Brett and
co-author Shirli Kopelman write about the cultural norms and
ideologies that affect such quandaries.
Leigh Thompson
and her co-authors discuss emotional biases, a hot new topic
that extends previous seminal research on cognitive biases
conducted at Kellogg in the 1980s. The authors assert that
strong emotions generally are counterproductive to forging
agreements in business.
Brett
says The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture should
offer new insights to those intellectually curious about this
evolving arena, including the ways scholars and practitioners
can capitalize on the synergy between culture and negotiation
research.
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