Cultural Impact on International Business Negotiation

Abstract: Background: The increasing global business competitiveness thoroughly intensifies the demand for improvements of communication and negotiation skills in order to adjust competence to successfully conduct the work of getting treaties of cooperation and business development to work everywhere. It is simply a matter of survival for an increasing amount of multinational companies operating in all kinds of different locations and businesses around the world. This state of nature also holds for Swedish and Spanish companies, that both heavily depend on foreign trade, and whose negotiating behavior is going to be the focus of this study. For every international company facing the challenges of developing new business in foreign cultures it should be of interest to find out what would improve their business interactions. The study is therefore investigating possible ways of how to deal with cultural implications that might appear in international business negotiations. Purpose: To study and analyze the presence of cultural impact on international business negotiations, with a special emphasis on Swedish-Spanish business negotiators. Method: Considering negotiations as a process-oriented phenomenon observed from empirical studies of individual cases and drawing conclusions thereof, the study takes a hermeneutic qualitative-inductive interaction approach. The frame of references are constitued by a thorough spectra of well established theories developed within the fields of communication, negotiation and intercultural studies. Result: The study proves that the behavior of negotiators are influencing the outcome of the negotiation, particularly in international contexts where the parties have different experiences, historical and cultural backgrounds as well as different perspectives on life.