Introduction

Joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, licensing and distribution agreements, and sales of products and services crucial aspects of all such interorganizational relationships, are face-to-face negotiations. As the proportion of foreign to domestic trade increases, so does the frequency of business negotiations between people from different countries and cultures. Perlmutter estimates that over 50% of an international manager's time is spent negotiating. To successfully manage these negotiations, businesspeople need to know how to influence and communicate with members of cultures other than their own.

While a growing literature exists documenting international negotiating styles, most studies are descriptive or comparative; that is, they describe the behavior of managers in a particular country or compare behaviors across a range of cultures. For example, there are articles describing the negotiating behavior of French, Russians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Middle Eastern Arabs, Chinese, and Japanese, along with a number of multicountry studies. The worldwide negotiation literature fits within the tradition of research on international organizational behavior. Unfortunately, this tradition has focused on single-culture descriptive studies and multiculture comparative studies, rather than studies investigating cross-cultural interaction. In a survey of articles published in top American management journals over the last decade, only 0.9% focused on cross-cultural interaction. As further exemplified in the most commonly used label for the field, "comparative management," both the field's earlier studies and the more recent research have emphasized within-culture description and comparison. This trend is not surprising given the field's inception during the era of international firms operating multidomestically rather than their current increasingly global scope. While the field of international management has included cross-national interaction studies, they tended to emphasize macro-level organizational, structural, and financial issues, not organizational behavior issues. The interaction of people within and between organizations has remained the domain of comparative management, thus casting most research in the light of single-culture descriptions and multicountry comparisons.

Implicit in many of the descriptive and comparative studies is the assumption that people behave similarly with their domestic colleagues as they do with their foreign counterparts. That is, these studies suggest that domestic negotiating styles predict international styles. Because most international businesspeople need to know how to negotiate with people from other cultures not simply how foreigners negotiate among themselves the validity of this assumption is critical. If valid, then the comparative literature can directly inform international managerial behavior; if invalid, we need to understand the ways in which within-culture behavior differs from intercultural behavior. The question, therefore, has both theoretical and practical importance.

To our knowledge, no other researchers have looked at the consistency of negotiator behavior across intra-culture and cross-cultural bargaining. In the present study, the behaviors of businesspeople from four culturally distinct groups (i.e., 190 Americans, 72 Japanese, 100 Francophone Canadians, and 100 Anglophone Canadians) are compared across intra-cultural and cross-cultural situations.