The effect of Dutch and German cultures on negotiation strategy comparing operations and innovation management in the supply chain

Conflict resolution or negotiations in different business settings may induce different types of negotiation behavior. More specifically, the usually more defined problems in an operations management (OM) setting may lead to different behavior than a usually more diffuse innovation management (IM) context. In addition, negotiators from different national cultures may react differently to such variations in business settings. This article tries to address these issues through a set of experiments, the specific aim of our study being to find out whether there is a difference between German and Dutch negotiators regarding their negotiation behavior in IM and OM settings. To analyze possible cross-cultural differences, negotiations that took place in a German monocultural setting and those in a Dutch monocultural setting are compared. Two hypotheses are formulated: • German negotiators are more cooperative in the OM context than in the IM context. • Dutch negotiators are more cooperative in the IM context than in the OM context. Both hypotheses could be confirmed by using speech act analysis and personal pronoun analysis, using a 2 * 2 experimental design with nationality as between-subject factor and business setting as within-subject factor. The data set we analyzed contains transcripts for 44 negotiators comprising 32.624 words in total. Non-cooperative speech acts related to the use of the first pronoun show your limits and there might be more need of this in the competitive setting of OM than in IM; Dutch negotiators had problems with using a cooperative attitude and building empathy in an OM context, whereas German negotiators discovered those problems in the IM situation.

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