| Globalization of industries and economies increases the frequency with which managers negotiate with partners from cultures other than their own. Like all negotiations, cross-cultural ones frequently involve knowledge asymmetries between parties. The increase in cross-cultural negotiations, therefore, raises questions regarding how cultural differences influence management of these asymmetries. Specifically, do cultural values, norms, or some combination thereof influence tendencies to play fair or exploit knowledge gaps? In my dissertation, I addressed these questions with three behavioral experiments.;In the first experiment, I validated measures of two theoretically relevant cultural values, collectivism and masculinity, and established a base rate for deception. In the second experiment, I tested my full theoretical model with a large sample of Americans placed in a bargaining context simulated with the partial-information ultimatum game. I used the third experiment to cross-culturally validate my model with a large sample of Chinese nationals.;While the results reveal that honesty is the dominant response in both American and Chinese samples, they also suggest that both norms and values interact to determine when members of each culture engage in deception in negotiation contexts and with whom. The pattern of results differed between the cultures, however. Whereas the values generally corresponded with deception by Americans bargaining with outgroup members, the pattern reversed in the Chinese sample. That is, the same factors corresponded more with deception by Chinese participants in the ingroup condition. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings. |
