Ethno‐cultural considerations in negotiation: pretense,deception and lies in the Greek workplace

A retrospect into ethos, this study examines the impact of individualism, collectivism, ethical idealism and interpersonal trust on negotiators' attitudes toward questionable negotiation tactics in Greece. A thousand survey questionnaires were administered to Greek employees, of which 327 usable responses were collected. Our findings empirically corroborated a classification of three groups of negotiation tactics, namely, pretense, deception and lies. Individualism–collectivism and ethical idealism were found to be related, and interpersonal trust was found to be unrelated, to attitudes toward questionable negotiation tactics. Emphasizing the non‐US and non‐Western European nature of the empirical data collected, the originality of this research further stems from the development of a comprehensive research framework about questionable negotiation tactics in Greece.     

Negotiators’ Attitudes toward Signing Business Contracts: Evidence from Greece and Israel

This study extends beyond negotiation process and styles, and focuses on negotiators’ tendency to sign formal contracts. Drawing on a risk mitigation perspective, it examines the influence of businesspeople's levels of horizontal and vertical individualism‐collectivism, ethical idealism, and trust propensity on their attitudes toward signing formal negotiated business contracts in Greece and in Israel. A survey questionnaire was translated from English to Greek and to Hebrew, and 649 responses were collected from employees who worked in industries such as banking, insurance, construction, manufacturing, retailing, and tourism in the Greek and Israeli private and public sectors. Our findings suggest that higher levels of horizontal individualism, horizontal collectivism, and ethical idealism increase employees’ tendency to sign formal contracts, whereas lower levels of general trust are associated with a higher propensity to sign formal contracts. Interestingly, employees’ propensity to sign formal contracts was significantly lower in Israel than in Greece. We argue that the propensity to sign formal contracts, and thus to mitigate potential agreement risks, is dependent on the individuals’ cultural and personal attributes. The study provides practitioners with a set of cultural and individual attributes that can serve as predictors of negotiators’ predisposition toward signing business contracts. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Deception and defection from ethical norms in market relationships: a general analytic framework

Market relationships built on trust and governed by commonly accepted ethical norms are generally viewed as economically positive and beneficial to both parties; however, such relationships are occasionally the situs of a variety of unexpected and ethically questionable behaviours. This study examines the narratives provided by participants who share their experience as an exchange partner in a market relationship or as a close observer of an exchange partner in a market relationship to identify the use of short‐term deceptions and ethics defections in managing these relationships. The data demonstrate a number of instances in which one exchange partner is willing to deceive another. Situations identified include deceiving current customers, new customers, current suppliers, governmental bodies, and employees and managers for the purposes of: protecting an existing relationship, pursuing a new relationship, ensuring product or service quality, and exerting control over a relationship. This research develops a general analytic framework for the occurrence of deception and defection from ethical norms in market relationships from elements of the study participants' narrative reports. This framework can be used by future researchers to design studies that examine the specific antecedents of these behaviours.     

Negotiating with the Chinese: Are They More Likely to Use Unethical Strategies?

It is always a challenge to deal with ethical dilemmas in negotiations and it is even more difficult when the other party is from a different culture. Understanding the differences between what is ethically appropriate and what is not in an international context has thus become important for a better understanding of different negotiation practices across the globe. This study explores the likelihood of Chinese negotiators’ using unethical strategies in negotiations by examining Chinese managerial employees’ perceived appropriateness of five categories of ethically questionable strategies. The results show that, in comparison with their counterparts from the USA, Chinese managers are more likely to consider it appropriate to use ethically questionable negotiation strategies in all five categories except the traditional bargaining strategies. In addition, contrary to the West where women tend to maintain higher ethical standards, no gender difference is found in China in the perceived appropriateness of using these strategies in all but one category. Implications for negotiation practitioners and international managers that often participate in international negotiations with the Chinese are then discussed, along with potential future research directions.     

East–West Differences in “Tricky” Tactics: A Comparison of the Tactical Preferences of Chinese and Australian Negotiators

How do Eastern and Western perceptions of “tricky” or ethically ambiguous negotiation tactics differ? We address this question by comparing 161 Chinese and 146 Australian participants’ ratings of the appropriateness of different types of negotiation tactics. We predict that their differing cultural values (e.g., individualism/collectivism, importance of face) as well as their different implicit theories of how negotiation ought to be conducted (i.e., mental models, such as captured in The Secret Art of War: The 36 Stratagems) will be salient in their perceptions of tactics. Examining 24 tactics falling into eight categories, we found that overall the Chinese respondents saw these tactics as more appropriate than did the Australian respondents. There were, however, differences across categories of tactics. Chinese participants rated tactics related to the 36 stratagems as significantly more appropriate than did Australian participants, including diverting attention, misrepresenting information and making false promises. In some cases, the Chinese also saw feigning positive feelings/emotions as more appropriate than did the Australian participants, while an Australian preference for feigning negative feelings/emotions was partially supported. The implications of these findings for practitioners are discussed, along with opportunities for future research.     

Lying and Smiling: Informational and Emotional Deception in Negotiation

This study investigated attitudes toward the use of deception in negotiation, with particular attention to the distinction between deception regarding the informational elements of the interaction (e.g., lying about or misrepresenting needs or preferences) and deception about emotional elements (e.g., misrepresenting one’s emotional state). We examined how individuals judge the relative ethical appropriateness of these alternative forms of deception, and how these judgments relate to negotiator performance and long-run reputation. Individuals viewed emotionally misleading tactics as more ethically appropriate to use in negotiation than informational deception. Approval of deception predicted negotiator performance in a negotiation simulation and also general reputation as a negotiator, but the nature of these relationships depended on the kind of deception involved.     

Perceptual differences in appropriateness and likelihood of use of negotiation behaviors: A cross-cultural analysis

This paper examines the influence of culture and economic climate on perceptions of ethicality of negotiation behaviors between two emerging trading partners in the Western Hemisphere. Three hundred and forty future business leaders from Brazil and the United States rated their perceptions of the appropriateness and likelihood of use of eighteen negotiation behaviors. The results indicate significant differences in perceptions of the appropriateness of most tactics, but similarities in terms of respondents' likelihood of employing tactics that involve third parties. For respondents from both countries, traditional competitive bargaining behaviors (e.g., pretending you are in no hurry, hiding your bottom line, exaggerating an opening demand) were among the most accepted tactics. The implications of these findings for cross-cultural negotiations are discussed, along with opportunities for future research.     

Business-to-Business Negotiations: The Role of Relativism,Deceit, and Opportunism

Purpose: Studies examining the impact of relativism and deceitful tendencies on unethical negotiation tactics have yielded inconsistent results; some studies report a positive relationship, some negative, while some others report a nonexistent relationship between these constructs. These inconsistencies suggest that there may be intervening variables mediating the effects of these factors on unethical negotiation tactics. We propose that opportunism plays an important role in determining the effects of these two antecedents on business managers' perceptions of unethical negotiation tactics.

Method: An Internet-based survey was administered to a sample of managers at U.S. firms engaged in business-to-business marketing. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to evaluate the mediating role of opportunism between deceitful tendencies and relativism on questionable negotiation tactics.

Findings: The analysis supports the hypothesized role of opportunism as a mediating variable. Opportunism was found to play a significant role in mediating the relationships of both relativism and deceitful tendencies on attitudes toward unethical negotiation tactics.

Contribution: In addition to the theoretical contributions suggested here, this article includes suggestions for minimizing the likelihood that a negotiation partner's relativism and deceitful tendencies will negatively impact business negotiation.     

The Relationship of Cognitive Effort,Information Acquisition Preferences and Risk to Simulated Auditor–Client Negotiation Outcomes

The auditor–client relationship is a legally-mandated relationship in which one party, the auditor, is hired and paid by the auditee (client) to inform third party stakeholders as to whether the client firm’s financial statements are presented in conformity with national financial accounting standards. When these statements do not meet the criteria for acceptable financial statements, a negotiation situation may arise in which the auditor is presumed to act in the best interests of shareholders and creditors who have no independent knowledge of the auditor’s findings. The client management may then feel forced to defend its numbers. The result is a negotiation between the auditor and client (e.g., Salterio in Account Financ 52:233–286, 2012; Brown and Wright in Account Horiz 22(1):91–109, 2008). This study examines cognitive factors and risk preference factors that may impact the negotiation both in the setting of each side’s negotiation position and on the outcomes of that negotiation using simulated auditor–client negotiations. Questionnaire and simulated auditor–client negotiations were used to generate the data, with MBA and MS in Accounting students playing the role of client CEOs and auditor partners. We further explore the use of a tool, Structural Equation Modeling, to test the data, in the process highlighting its usefulness in auditor–client negotiation research. We find that the cognitive characteristic of need for cognition is significantly and positively related to achievement of the negotiator’s desired income objectives and reported willingness to argue strongly for his/her position. Actively open-minded thinking, a second cognitive variable studied, was not significantly related to success in the negotiations, nor to a reported willingness to argue strongly for his/her position. Finally, we find that perceived aggressive tactics by the other party to the negotiation had a negative impact on the counterpart negotiator’s success in the negotiation, and satisfaction with it. As expected, risk assessment-related variables were not related to outcomes of interest.     

Correction to: Developing Ethical Confidence: The Impact of Action-Oriented Ethics Instruction in an Accounting Curriculum

After the USSR collapsed, the Russian economy underwent serious changes from being plan-based to a market economy. These changes, together with political instability, created a business environment where no attention was paid to ethics. Russian managers have little experience operating in a market economy, which created many misunderstandings with foreign partners, especially regarding ethical issues of doing business. This study examined the factors influencing the ethical judgments of Russian employees to understand how they perceive ethical issues and make ethical or unethical decisions at work. The Ferrell and Gresham (J Mark 49:87–96, 1985) framework was employed in this study to understand the process of making ethical decision by an individual. Transparency was proposed as a moderator of the relationship between opportunity factors and employees’ ethical judgments. Findings of this study show that Russian employees tend to be more tolerant towards ethically questionable behaviors at a workplace. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that transparency moderates the influence of opportunity to behave unethically on ethical judgments.     

Economic science and ethical neutrality II: The intransigence of evaluative concepts

This paper returns to a perennial controversy I examined in a previous paper in the Journal of Business Ethics (Vol. 2, 1983). Is economic theory an ethically neutral discipline or do its statements presuppose a commitment to moral values? Once again this issue is addressed via a case study of the neo-classical theory of rational choice. In the present paper I focus on behaviourist forms of “operationalist” attempts to short-circuit any argument that would seek to infer moral presuppositions from the use of evaluative discourse. In particular, I examine strategies that have sought to excise from economic theory the “mentalistic” vocabulary required to describe valuations per se. And I argue that such tactics are deficient since they i) impoverish the explanatory power of economic theory, (ii) fail to recover the normative usefulness of the theory of choice, and (iii) camouflage the continued presupposition of moral commitments within neo-classical theory.     

Negotiating with the Chinese: EANTs and all

The Chinese negotiation style remains enigmatic for many foreign negotiators. This article is written for foreign negotiators going to China and explores how Chinese negotiators think about ethically ambiguous negotiation tactics (EANTs), focusing on how the relationship with the other party influences the appropriateness of such tactics. Two studies are presented: an interpretation of interview data followed by a survey that shows Chinese negotiators rate EANTs as significantly less appropriate when they have a relationship with the other party. Advice for negotiators going to China is provided. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The ethical profile of global marketing negotiators

As international trade and business opportunities grow globally, insight into trading partners’ strategies is essential. One of the major strategies that impact trading partners’ relationships is negotiation strategy employed by each partner. These strategies assume even greater importance when these strategies have ethical content. This study examines the effects of marketing executives’ preferred ethical ideologies (relativism and idealism), opportunism and Machiavellianism on their perceived appropriateness of unethical negotiation tactics. Utilizing a sample of 995 marketing executives from six countries, cluster analysis and multivariate analysis of variance revealed two types of marketing negotiators: principled and corrupt negotiators. Corrupt negotiators tend to be more Machiavellian, more relativist, more opportunistic and less idealistic than their principled counterparts. Principled negotiators tend to perceive unethical negotiation tactics less favorably than their corrupt counterparts. Implications of these results for practitioners and directions for future research are discussed.     

Your Good Name: The Relationship Between Perceived Reputational Risk and Acceptability of Negotiation Tactics

Reputation serves important functions in social interactions. As a result, negotiators should be concerned about protecting their reputations. Using an online experiment with 343 respondents, we examined the impact of perceived reputational risk on the acceptability of potentially questionable tactics. Consistent with and extending previous findings, we found that, the more reputational risk negotiators perceive, the less acceptable they find the tactics to be. In addition, in the business negotiation context, females generally viewed questionable tactics as more reputationally risky and consequently less acceptable than did males, especially when they were primed to think of themselves as being powerful. We end our paper with discussions on contributions and implications of the findings.     

Why and How Does Social Responsibility Differ Among SMEs? A Social Capital Systemic Approach

Research suggests that organizational justice (procedural, distributive, and interactional justice) has important impacts on work-related attitudes and behaviors, such as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In this article, we explore the extent to which individualism moderates the relationship between organizational justice and OCB (organizational obedience, participation, and loyalty) among citizens in Kyrgyzstan. We make additional contributions to the literature because we know very little about these constructs in this former Soviet Union country, Kyrgyzstan, an under-researched and under-represented region of the world. Results of our data collected from 402 managers and employees in Kyrgyzstan offer the following new discoveries. All three justice constructs are related to OCB. Individualism moderates only the distributive and interactive justice to OCB relationships. We develop an intricate theory with provocative implications: Procedural justice produces obedience. For “individualists,” interactional justice inspires loyalty and, interestingly, distributive justice “can only buy” participation, but “can’t buy” loyalty. Therefore, for individualists, interactional justice outweighs distributive justice for organizational loyalty. Based on Kyrgyz citizens’ justice, OCB, and individualism, our theory reveals novel insights regarding culture, money attitude, and intrinsic motivation and provides critical and practical implications to the field of business ethics.     

The effects of tied and untied development loans

A decisive change now seems to be occurring in the development practices of the major OECD donor countries. Their own economic objectives are being moved distinctly closer to centre stage. Changes in the instruments of development policy are reputed to generate direct benefits for their own economies. The following article shows that such behaviour is questionable.     

Creating Corporate Accountability: Foundational Principles to Make Corporate Citizenship Real

This paper explores the growing array of initiatives aimed at creating corporate accountability with the goal of attempting to uncover the foundation principles that underlie them and create a floor below which practices are ethically questionable. Using the Global Compact's nine principles and the work of Transparency International as guides, foundational principles seem to exist in the areas of human rights, labor standards, environment, and anti-corruption initiatives.     

Dancing on the Slippery Slope: The Effects of Appropriate Versus Inappropriate Competitive Tactics on Negotiation Process and Outcome

As negotiation is critical to all forms of organizational decision-making, researchers have shown an interest in understanding how the flow of information (valid and otherwise) influences this process. Often, competitive, questionable, and unethical tactics have been treated as interchangeable in these studies, despite presumed differences in appropriateness. The purpose of this study was to examine the similarities and differences in negotiators’ use and efficacy of appropriate competitive tactics (e.g., exaggerated offers) versus inappropriate competitive tactics (e.g., factual misrepresentations), primarily through a negotiation simulation. The study found that although these two categories of tactics were correlated in terms of overall use, appropriate competitive behaviors were used more frequently, especially early in negotiations, and these behaviors often resulted in comparable responses from counterparts. While ultimately increasing the likelihood of a negotiation impasse, the use of appropriate competitive tactics improved an individual’s substantive outcome where agreements could be reached. Inappropriate competitive tactics were likely to increase in number the sooner they were first employed in negotiations, with a response of inappropriate competitive tactics to the first use of competitive tactics increasing the likelihood of subsequent use of inappropriate tactics. The implications of these and other findings for both practitioners and future research are discussed.     

An Empirical Quest to Identify the Most Dominant Negotiating Styles Among American Sales Managers

SUMMARY

This study addresses the proposition as to whether the collaborative negotiation style is the most prevalent among American sales managers in the competitive landscape created by the global economy. It also examines whether there are relationships between the sales managers' negotiation styles and selected personal and organizational characteristics that may affect negotiation styles. The findings of the study reveal that the collaborative style is indeed the most predominant. However, some sales managers do still emphasize the competitive style. This variation may imply Weitz's (1981) Weitz, B. 1981. Effectiveness in sales interactions: A contingency framework. Journal of Marketing, 45(1): 85–103. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] adaptive behaviors. There are also significant relationships between the sales managers' negotiation styles and personal and organizational characteristics.     

Intercultural communication patterns and tactics: Nordic expatriates in Japan

This study provides a Nordic expatriate perspective on intercultural communication patterns and tactics in Japan. Interviews with 30 Nordic expatriates reveal that divergent communication styles, the cultural values of verticality and collectivism, and the lack of shared language have a negative impact on intercultural communication. The interviews reveal that rather than remaining passive bystanders, expatriates adopt various tactics to increase intercultural communication. These include engaging in informal interactions with Japanese employees and managers, sharing and monitoring space, and language training. Implications and suggestions are offered for future research.