Social Identity and Socialisaiton in Cross-National Negotiation

Swee Hoon Chuah | RMIT

Globalisation is transforming business negotiation in two interdependent ways. First, cultural differences between negotiators entail different social identities and socialisation into different cognitive traits. Second, negotiations are increasingly conducted remotely via different communication media. We introduce a framework of cross-cultural negotiation where the communication medium mediates the effects of cultural socialisation and social identity on negotiation outcomes. To test it we administered a new experimental negotiation task to 378 participants who communicated using three different media. Negotiation outcomes differ significantly according to counterparties nationality which we attribute to socialisation into cultural values and personality traits rather than social identity.