BUS403: Negotiations and Conflict Management

Read about the role of ethics when negotiating with others and how national culture plays a role in negotiations. This section gives an example of the need to understand differences in cultures. In China, companies and workers do not like to say no. A question that asks for a yes or no answer, therefore, may put a Chinese official in an uncomfortable position of saying no, which they likely would not do. To accommodate this way of thinking, the author suggests that we might rephrase the question to open-ended questions, like "how will you do this for us, and will it be done?"