"Culture, scripts and negotiation"

Abstract

Much of the current research on culture and negotiation has taken the approach of generalizing the effects of culturally specific norms or attitudes to the negotiation context. However, negotiation experiences may differ across cultures, societies and nations, and these experiences can form the basis of culture-specific cognitive schemas or scripts. We present a set of studies contrasting the performance of naive negotiators in Pakistan, a relatively collectivistic culture, what that of Canadians, a relatively individualist culture. Our findings consistently show that the Pakistani naive negotiators are comparatively more competitive and less efficient than their Canadian counterparts. Pakistani naive negotiators were also significantly more likely than Canadians to characterize negotiation as competitive marketplace bargaining than an agreement between cooperating partners. In three different negotiations, the Pakistanis were less likely to create value by capitalizing on issues that were mutually profit...