The Influence of Cultural Difference on Business Negotiation

The Influence of Cultural Difference on Business Negotiation

Ⅰ. Introduction

  International business negotiation is playing a more and more important role in modem society. We can see clearly that there are great differences in international business negotiation. Specially, culture can influence negotiating styles in different ways, because negotiators who may come from another nation is different from us in language, beliefs, behaviors manners, Privacy, Food custom, time, thinking, value and attitudes and so on. Different cultures express different ways of doing business. Even though negotiators are well prepared, it is not so easy to reach a satisfactory agreement between negotiators across cultures. Negotiations can be easily broken down due to a lack of mutual understanding of the cultures. Culture affects negotiation even before negotiators meet with face to face. Therefore, learning the opponent's culture and having a good understanding of how cultural differences affect negotiation will be critically important if one wants to succeed in cross-cultural negotiations.

Ⅱ. Cultural Differences

    Now, with the rapid development of economic globalization and the prosperity of international bussiness, international business negotiation are a very common and important activity in the world. But during the negotiation, it is all to natural that conflicts occur where both sides have different views about their own interest or culture. To be fully prepared before the negotiation, negotiators should pay attention to the culture differences, such as privacy, time, Food practices, and so on. Since culture does matter much in international negotiations, the first step is to focus on impacts of culture differences on business negotiation.

2.1.The Difference of Privacy

  Chinese people's privacy concepts are relatively weak, but personal privacy are very importance for westerners, emphasize personal space, they are not willing to mention their own...