The Impact of Cultural Difference on Online Text-based Negotiation Behaviour: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods

Ever since the booming of global e-business and its severe competition, crosscultural e-negotiation has been getting popular. To understand how national culture may affect negotiation behaviour becomes critical for doing business. This research is to explore how negotiators' own and their counterparts' cultural backgrounds impact their negotiation behaviour. We applied content analysis to 80 pairs of online negotiation transcripts and then conducted chi-square test to compare the differences in negotiation behaviour between Eastern and Western and their counterparts. Hopefully, the integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods could provide more thorough observations on negotiation behaviour. There are two stages in this research. First, for overall negotiation behaviour, we proposed hypotheses based on literatures and then conducted chi-square test. Second, for differences in single category of negotiation behaviour, we proposed propositions based on the chi-square analysis results. We found that the negotiation behaviour of Eastern and Western is impacted not only by their own cultural backgrounds but also by their counterparts' cultural backgrounds. Overall, compared with Eastern negotiators, Western has more consistent negotiation behaviour no matter if there is cultural difference between dyadic negotiators. For single category of negotiation behaviour, Eastern and Western negotiators in intra- and cross-cultural present different negotiation behaviour. We infer that these results could come from synergistic effect of cultural differences, media richness and language familiarity. It deserves further study in the future.

並列關鍵字

Online Negotiation ； Cultural Difference ； Negotiation Behaviour ； Content Analysis ； Media Richness

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