Authors: Frank Jacob; Nathalie Prime; Robert Wilken; Tayfun Aykac
Negotiations in business-to-business (B2B) markets between selling and buying companies increasingly cross borders. In these negotiations, managers are often confronted with unequal power distributions. Extant research focuses on the parties’ best alternatives to negotiated agreements (BATNA) andnetwork options as antecedents of such power asymmetries.Parties in low power positions regularly reach poor negotiation outcomes because stronger parties likely apply behavioral patterns such as threats. However, these studies do not consider attributes of negotiations between parties with different cultural backgrounds, which may impact how parties exercise power. Hence, we use an intercultural setting to study power asymmetries. Combining theories regarding power and culture-bound negotiation styles, we predict negotiation strategies (integrative, distributive) to be conditional on the level of collectivism of the more powerful party. Hereby, we manipulate power through team size and extend the investigation to culturally mixed teams. To test our hypotheses, we simulate B2B negotiations between a seller team (high-power party) and a solo buyer (low-power party). The empirical results from German-French dyads show that the culture-bound negotiation style of the high-power party dominates the interaction. In contrast, and interestingly, the low-power party neglects its culture-specific negotiation style and instead uses the style of its counterpart. This, in turn, urges low-power parties to carefully choose an appropriate negotiation strategy, and to enhance its power position by increasing its team size.
Journal: n.a. (n.a. – n.a.)
Web Address: n.a.
Publish Year: 2012
Conference: Rome, Italy (2012)