Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Publication Title
Group Decision and Negotiation
Keywords
Business negotiations, conflict management styles, perceived face threat, guanxi, public self-consciousness
Abstract
Despite increasingly frequent business interactions between China and the West, negotiations with Chinese remain a great challenge to most Westerners. Sino-Western discrepancies in cultural values and social norms lead to massive misunderstandings and inevitable conflicts in business negotiations. Grounded on the Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson 1987), this study aims to better predict Chinese negotiation behaviors from an indigenous perspective by exploring the impact of face on Chinese conflict handling strategies. With a sample of 608 Chinese business representatives, this research demonstrates the significant effect of perceived fellowship-, moral-, competence- and autonomy-face threats on Chinese conflict management styles in business negotiations. It is found that Chinese do not always act as politely and agreeably as expected when bargaining with their business partners, especially in a conflict context. Based on their perceptions of face threats induced by various conflict issues, they may adopt different strategies, ranging from competing, collaborating, compromising, accommodating to avoiding, to negotiate with their counterparts. In addition, it is confirmed that both a contextual antecedent (guanxi) and an individual trait (public self-consciousness) will significantly influence Chinese representatives’ face threat perceptions and, subsequently, determine how they will behave in business negotiations.
DOI
10.1007/s10726-019-09645-2
Recommended Citation
Zhao, Zhoujia; Chen, Hung-Hsin; and Li, Kevin. (2019). Management of Interpersonal Conflict in Negotiation with Chinese: A Perceived Face Threat Perspective. Group Decision and Negotiation.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/odettepub/130