Business Negotiation Model through Computer Mediated Communication

Abstract

With the globalization of the world economy, it is imperative that managers, both present and future, be sensitive to differences in intercultural business communication. In particular, the context of electronic commerce leads to an increasing use of email in negotiating deals, which has been so far almost exclusively the domain of face to face (FTF) or at best telephone, but not of computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as email. How to prepare for it by training, such as in the educational setting of Schools of Management and Industrial Engineering? How to analyze special effects of email on major negotiation strategies, such as “win-win” and “put yourselves in the shoes of the other party”? Psycholinguistic act analysis has proven to be a reliable and valid way to test hypotheses on intercultural communication effects. A safe first step to explore its applicability to email is to analyze it in notice writing with the only difference of using a pen instead of a keyboard as a kind of simulated email which is non FTF: people do not see each other. Such simulated email seems to require its toll by asking more indirect language. Is this always efficient? Sellers use significantly more “you” than buyers, which is a good sales technique. In sum, this simulated email seems to make it difficult to get involved in the other party's needs by using cooperative speech acts and second personal pronoun use. Special training, such as the one of this study could handle this handicap. Finally the results of this study lead to suggestions for future work, such as controlled studies with adequate sampling to compare CMC and FTF in different order of succession and simulation and real life with negotiation experience as a source of variation. In this study, linguistic analysis appeared to be a very useful tool to describe and verify negotiation strategies in a simulated email setting.