Cultural differences during international negotiation: Experiment, exploration and analysis of the possible differences between Chinese and Italians

Abstract

In the last twenty years China and Chinese market have experienced an unexpected and enormous growth. This rapid economic growth has attracted a lot of foreign investors who have seen in the Chinese market a pool full of opportunities and resources ready to be exploited. Like the first adventurers that went to explore the “Far West” a long time ago, now today’s businessmen start venturing in what we can call “Far East”. Nowadays these businessmen were supposing that thanks to globalization, the advances in communication and transportation technology neither physical nor cultural barriers still exist, but this is wrong. China has a millennial history and culture deeply rooted at all the levels of its society and in every domain of their life, so even in the commercial and business field cultural issues should be respected. If a businessman fails to do this the deal will surely never take place. During my year as an international student in China and the “Chinese commercial negotiation” class in Venice I have developed a particular interest for this topic, the negotiation. Moreover, I am even more fascinated to observe how much soft factors like culture can influence the negotiation process. So, since the main literature about the differences in the negotiating style of Chinese and Westerners negotiators is mainly focused on Chinese versus Americans, I decided to arrange a small experiment to start giving a frame of what will be the differences between Italian and Chinese negotiators and make also an analysis of their characteristic behaviour. In this work I will go through a general introduction on the negotiation, the process and the main biases that may occur, chapter 1. Chapter 2 is about culture, how it can influence the negotiation and what are the general behavioural profile of some European and American negotiators, e.g. the German one, the French one, and so on. The main core of chapter 3 is the Chinese negotiation style and all the cultural issues related to it. The last chapter, chapter 4, is about the experiment I have made in Venice with 9 Italian and 9 Chinese students. I have arranged them into couple and then I made them negotiate one against the other. in chapter 4 I explain everything about the experiment and I have also made an analysis about the data collected during the different negotiations. The main aim of this work is just to give an impulse to continue a research on this topic and try to understand how presence of very different cultures can influence a negotiation process.