Culture in Negotiation Essay

What is a good outcome in negotiation? What does it take to get a good outcome? What goes wrong in a negotiation that has a poor outcome? However, if culture has an effect on negotiation, the mental models of negotiators from one culture may not map on to the mental models of negotiators from another culture, making the speci ® cation of a single mental model problematic. There are two ways to approach this problem of specifying a mental model of negotiation. One is to specify the model in use in one culture and then compare and contrast its elements with elements of models of negotiatio n from other cultures. Alternatively, we can specify the mental models of negotiation in many different cultures and aggregate their common and unique elements. The latter approach is less likely to overlook culturally unique aspects of negotiation, but requires the prior existence or current construction of many culturally emic (unique) models of negotiation. (See Brett, Tinsley, Janssens, Barsness, & Lytle, 1997 for a discussion of these two approaches to designing cross-cultural research. ) This article relies on the  ® rst approach because there is a well-speci ® ed model of negotiation grounded in Western theory and empirical