Cross-Cultural Interactions

A series of studies by social psychologists and sociolinguists suggests that negotiators in a dyad tend to imitate one another's behaviors and balance individual negotiation outcomes. Gouldner explains that a "reciprocity norm" establishes a stable set of mutual rewards that guides interactions such as negotiations. Putnam and Jones report that reciprocity is more evident in integrative message patterns than in distributive strategies. Walton and McKersie, Rubin and Brown, and Pruitt all describe a tendency of negotiators to match one another's bargaining strategies. 

Even deeper than Gouldner's reciprocity norm are the unconscious influences of the sociolinguistic concept of interactional synchrony. Condon and others have reported that a speaker's body movements are coordinated with one another and coordinated with the articulation of speech. Moreover, these movements manifest a hierarchical organization parallel to that of speech. That is, minor body movements may be associated with phrase transition within sentences, whereas grosser body movements may be associated with thematic transition within a conversation. More significant is the finding that listener's back-channel verbal responses and body movements (e.g., the use of the word "yes" or head-nodding to indicate comprehension) are also coordinated in the same hierarchical way with the articulation of another's speech. Interactional synchrony has been defined as the isomorphism of verbal and nonverbal behaviors between speaker and listeners (i.e., "the precise 'dance-like' sharing of micro-body-motion patterns of change between speakers and listeners").

Therefore, based on these concepts of reciprocity and synchrony, negotiators in cross-cultural interactions might be expected to adapt their usual intra-cultural behaviors to more closely reflect those of their foreign counterparts. Likewise, outcomes of cross-cultural negotiations may reflect a compromise between results typical of the differing intracultural styles.