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.     

Negotiators' Communication, Perception of Their Counterparts, and Performance in Dyadic E-negotiations

The aim of this study was to improve our understanding of negotiation strategies, behaviors, and outcomes, and the relationships between these factors based on data collected from questionnaires, actual behavior during the negotiation process implemented using e-negotiation system, and the negotiation outcomes. This study clustered the negotiators based on either the negotiators' own strategies or their thoughts about those of their partners. This resulted in a division into cooperative and noncooperative clusters. We found that the negotiators whose own strategies are less cooperative tend to submit more offers but fewer messages. However, these people consIDer that they have less control over the negotiation process compared with those who adopt a more cooperative strategy, who make fewer offers but send more messages. Those in the cooperative cluster consistently feel friendlier about the negotiation and more satisfied with the outcome and their performance. Further, there is a correlation not only between self-strategies and the thoughts about partners' strategies, but also between strategies and final agreements. Finally, the proportion of negotiations reaching agreement is larger for the cooperative cluster than for the noncooperative cluster.     

Ethical and Unethical Bargaining Tactics: An Empirical Study

Competitive negotiators frequently use tactics which others view as "unethical", in that these tactics either violate standards of truth telling or violate the perceived rules of negotiation. This paper sought to determine how business students viewed a number of marginally ethical negotiating tactics, and to determine the underlying factor structure of these tactics. The factor analysis of these tactics revealed five clear factors which were highly similar across the two samples, and which parallel (to a moderate degree) categories of tactics proposed by earlier theory. Data from one sample also permitted comparisons of the appropriateness of certain tactics across gender, nationality, ethnic origin and perception of one's negotiating style.     

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.     

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.     

Managerial and Public Attitudes Toward Ethics in Marketing Research

This research updates and significantly extends Akaah and Riordon’s (J Market Res 26:112–120, 1989) evaluation of ethical perceptions of marketing research misconduct among marketing research professionals. In addition to examining changes in perceptions toward key marketing research practices over time, we assess professionals’ judgments on the ethicality, importance, and occurrence of a variety of new marketing research ethics situations in both online and offline contexts. In a second study, we assess ethical judgments of the public at large using a representative sample of US consumers—key stakeholders ignored in prior research on unethical marketing research practices. Generally speaking, disapproval of unethical research conduct has grown across the board in the last 20?years for both managers and marketing researchers. The same misconduct elicits a stronger disapproval in the online environment compared to the offline environment. Compared to marketing researchers, managers tend to think that unethical research conduct occurs more frequently. Those who conduct marketing research or use its findings (i.e., marketing researchers and managers) are less tolerant of unethical research conduct than the general public.     

Moral Emotions and Unethical Bargaining: The Differential Effects of Empathy and Perspective Taking in Deterring Deceitful Negotiation

Two correlational studies tested whether personality differences in empathy and perspective taking differentially relate to disapproval of unethical negotiation strategies, such as lies and bribes. Across both studies, empathy, but not perspective taking, discouraged attacking opponents’ networks, misrepresentation, inappropriate information gathering, and feigning emotions to manipulate opponents. These results suggest that unethical bargaining is more likely to be deterred by empathy than by perspective taking. Study 2 also tested whether individual differences in guilt proneness and shame proneness inhibited the endorsement of unethical bargaining tactics. Guilt proneness predicted disapproval of false promises and misrepresentation. Empathy did not predict disapproval of false promises when guilt proneness was included in the analysis. The comparatively private nature of the sin of false promises suggests that private ethical breaches are more likely to be deterred by anticipated guilt, while ethical breaches with clear interpersonal consequences are more likely to be deterred by empathy.     

Money,Emotions, and Ethics Across Individuals and Countries

This article presents two separate but closely related studies. We used a first sample to investigate the relationships among individuals’ reports of their income and their subjective well-being, and their approval of unethical behavior in 27 countries and a second sample to investigate the relationship between corruption in 55 countries and their populace’s aggregated feelings of subjective well-being (happiness). Analysis of data from 27,762 working professionals showed that, although reported feelings of subjective well-being were negatively related to their approval of unethical behaviors, income was positively related to their approval of unethical behaviors. In addition, the effects for feelings of subjective well-being were particularly strong for high-income people. Analyses also showed that, after controlling for economic development and other country-level factors, corruption was negatively related to a country’s feelings of happiness. These findings suggest that feelings of subjective well-being may lead to more ethical, less corrupt behavior and that the tolerance of unethical, corrupt behavior may lead to less collective happiness and subjective well-being.     

Ethical and Unethical Leadership: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Sectoral Analysis

Current literature on ethical leadership and unethical leadership reflects a Western-based private sector perspective, pointing toward a compliance-oriented understanding of ethical and unethical leadership. As today’s executives increasingly have to ethically lead across different cultures and sectors, it becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture how ethical and unethical leadership is perceived in the Western and Eastern cultural cluster and the private and the public/social sector. Addressing this issue, the present study aims to identify cross-cultural and cross-sectoral commonalities and differences in international executives’ perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership. Findings from in-depth interviews (N = 36) with executives from Western and Eastern cultures working in the private or the public/social sector reveal collectively held perceptions of ethical leadership (including leader honesty, integrity, concern for responsibility/sustainability, and people orientation) and of unethical leadership (referring to leader dishonesty, corruption, egocentrism, and manipulation). Results indicate limited support for a compliance-oriented perspective on ethical and unethical leadership but yield a much greater trend toward a value-oriented perspective. Concrete practice examples illustrate these different perspectives. Cultural and sectoral particularities of executive perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership 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.     

Ethical reasoning in business‐to‐business negotiations: evidence from relationships in the chemical industry in Germany

This article explores managers’ ethical reasoning for behaviors in price negotiations using evidence from 15 in‐depth interviews conducted with sales and purchasing representatives in the chemical industry in Germany. Applying transaction cost economics, we find that negotiators in commoditized market‐like exchanges either refer to deontological norms such as not to lie, or they neglect a role for ethics, arguing that distributive negotiation is per se opportunistic. In contrast, exchanges of products with higher asset specificity lead to stronger informational integration which is supported with teleological justifications. Some negotiators use teleological justification to build business on trust rather than on economic safeguards as their firm norms would require. For negotiators, our results suggest considering institutional context and adjusting ethical reasoning to the negotiation situation. Firms need to recognize and find ways to address the potential conflicts of their internal norms with their frontline managers’ attempts to act in the firms’ best economic and ethical interests.     

Maybe It’s Right,Maybe It’s Wrong: Structural and Social Determinants of Deception in Negotiation

Context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. Focusing on negotiators use of deception, we used a simulated two-party negotiation to test how three contextual variables—regulatory focus, power, and trustworthiness—interacted to shift negotiators’ ethical thresholds. We demonstrated that these three variables interact to either inhibit or activate deception, providing support for an interactionist model of ethical decision-making. Three patterns emerged from our analyses. First, low power inhibited and high power activated deception. Second, promotion-focused negotiators favored sins of omission, whereas prevention-focused negotiators favored sins of commission. Third, low cognition-based trust influenced deception when negotiators experience fit between power and regulatory focus, whereas affect-based trust influenced deception when negotiators experience misfit between these structural context variables. We conclude that regulatory focus primes different moral templates: promotion-focused negotiators’ decision to deceive is determined by moral pragmatism, whereas prevention-focused negotiators’ decision to deceive is determined by opportunism. Because each combination of power and regulatory focus was tied to a specific subcomponent of trust, we further conclude that negotiators engage in motivated information search to determine whether they should deceive their opponents.     

Business students’ attitudes toward unethical behavior: A multi-country comparison

Business students are confronted early in their academic careers with examples of questionable acts and practices related to individual and corporate integrity. The current study identifies four segments of students with respect to their attitudes toward unethical behavior and is one of the first known attempts to understand country corruption and its impact on students of business. Findings from a worldwide survey of over 6,000 business students suggest that corruption does breed corruption and that business students in more corrupt countries have a greater likelihood than their counterparts in less corrupt countries to equate legal and ethical. It appears that business students in more corrupt countries expect to use the law as their ethical gauge in business decisions.

Bargaining with the gringos: An exploratory study of negotiations between Mexican and U.S. firms

This study examines the nature of negotiations between Mexican and U.S. business people. It was learned that U.S. negotiators tend to be more structured, less flexible, more direct, more focused on the specific terms of the agreement, and possibly more assertive than their Mexican counterparts. Factor analysis revealed five factors related to the success of negotiations between Mexican and U.S. business people: attributes of communication, knowledge, good faith in arranging countertrades, delivery requirements, and personal relationships. Communication problems appear to have a more important impact on successful negotiations than do the technical or financial aspects of the negotiation. Contexting and reciprocity are related themes that need to be given more attention if negotiations between Mexican and US. business people are to improve. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

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 Dynamics of Guanxi and Ethics for Chinese Executives

This study empirically examines how Chinese executives perceive the role of guanxi and ethics played in their business operations. By factor-analyzing 850 valid replies collected from a comprehensive survey, the present study identifies three distinct ethics-related attitudes and two distinct guanxi-related attitudes for Chinese executives. The cluster analysis of the composite scores of these five attitudinal factors further indicates the existence of three distinct groups of Chinese executives that vary in their ethics and guanxi orientations. The three groups are unethical profit seeker (UPS), anti-governance, guanxi-cultivator (AGGC), and apathetic executive (AE). The three groups are also found to be significantly different in such demographic characteristics as age and the ownership structure of the serving organization. Specifically, the inter-group comparison suggests that younger Chinese executives, and those working for privately-owned firms and joint ventures are more inclined to engage in unethical activities for profits. These findings provide useful insights for international investors to formulate their human resource and negotiation strategies in China.     

Spanish and American Executives' Ethical Judgments and Intentions

This study explores differences between executives in the U.S. and Spain in their perceptions of ethical issues in pricing, specifically comparing a domestic firm's actions affecting a foreign market versus a foreign firm's actions affecting the domestic market. Overall, Spanish and American executives provided somewhat different responses to the scenarios. Findings indicate that ethical judgments and intentions among Spanish executives did not vary based on which country was harmed. U.S. executives generally perceived that a morally questionable act directed at a foreign country was more unethical than a morally questionable act directed at the United States. Possible explanations for these findings are suggested.     

Ethical Decision-Making by Consumers: The Roles of Product Harm and Consumer Vulnerability

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of perceptions of product harm and consumer vulnerability on ethical evaluations of target marketing strategies. We first established whether subjects are able to accurately judge the harmfulness of a product through labeling alone, and whether they could differentiate consumers who were more or less vulnerable. The results suggest that without the presence of a prime, subjects who depended on implicit memory or guess were able to detect differences in “sin” and “non-sin” products and consumer vulnerability, but were far less likely to be able to distinguish among high and low levels of product harm and consumer vulnerability. The inability to accurately identify high and low levels of product harm and consumer vulnerability impacted their perceptions of the ethicality of target marketing strategies, such that only four out of 18 target marketing strategies were judged as unethical. Thus, our findings contradict previous research that found subjects judged many more of the integrated strategies as unethical [Smith and Cooper-Martin, J Market 61(1997) 1]. Our results suggest that assessing ethical evaluations of strategies varying in product harm, and consumer vulnerability may only be relevant if consumers can accurately identify product harm.     

Mexico

Not understanding the cultural aspects of doing business overseas can jeopardize the success of international negotiations, entry strategies, joint ventures, technology transfer, marketing, and human resources. This article reports a study of the perceptions of U.S. and Mexican executives concerning the importance of 15 cultural dimensions of doing business in Mexico (our second largest trading partner). It found that, whereas Mexican executives believed more strongly than U.S. executives that the cultural dimensions of doing business in Mexico were more important than the product or service offered and the accompanying terms of sale, the U.S. executives, surprisingly, assigned higher levels of importance to the 15 cultural variables. Both Mexican and U.S. executives strongly agreed on which of the 15 variables were most important. All eight subgroups of U.S. executives assigned higher levels of importance to the 15 cultural aspects of doing business in Mexico than did their Mexican counterparts. When four comparisons of the executives of the eight subsets of U.S. companies‐large vs. small, border location vs. nonborder location, doing business in Mexico vs. not doing business there, and doing business there more than 5 years (pre‐NAFTA) vs. doing business there 5 years or less (post‐NAFTA)—were made of the level of importance they attached to the cultural variables, no significant differences were found. Based on the study's findings, implications for doing business in Mexico are indicated. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Strategies and language trends in learning success and failure of negotiation

In negotiation by electronic means, language is an important deal-making tool which helps realize negotiation strategies. Negotiators may use language to request information, exchange offers, persuade, threaten, as well as reach a compromise or find prospective partners. All this is recorded in texts exchanged by negotiators. We explore the language signals of strategies—argumentation, persuasion, negation, proposition. Leech and Svartvik’s approach to language in communication gives our study the necessary systematic background. It combines pragmatics, the communicative grammar and the meaning of English verbs. Language signals become features in the task of classifying those texts. We employ Statistical Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to find general trends that negotiation texts exhibit. Our hypothesis is that language signals help predict negotiation outcomes. We run experiments on the Inspire data. The electronic negotiation support system Inspire was gathering data for several years. The data include text messages which negotiators may exchange while trading offers. We conduct a series of Machine Learning experiments to predict the negotiation outcome from the texts associated with first halves of negotiations. We compare the results with the classification of complete negotiations. We conclude the paper with an analysis of the results and a list of suggestions for future work.