Negotiating through video: Comparing contextual and task -focused cultures.

Abstract

Video has been shown to be important for people who do not share common ground, like those who are speaking a second language (English) with those from another country (Veinott et al., 1999). However, in countries outside the US, people are known to focus more on relationships and converse with more attention to the context of the interaction. In this study, we tested whether video is more important for people from relationship-based contextual cultures like China than people from tasked-based explicit cultures like the US. Fifty pairs of American graduate students and forty-six pairs of Chinese graduate students participated in the study, each speaking their native language. Participants role-played a negotiation task, which involved an agreement on three drugs from a list of nine, each of which had a separate payoff for each side. Each side was to persuade the other to agree to a solution that maximized his/her individual payoff. Half the pairs from each culture communicated over audio-only and half over audio plus video. There are three types of measures: performance, trust perception, and communication process. Performance was measured by the negotiation time and cooperation behavior (the total payoff of a pair). Trust perception was measured by the trust questionnaire including four affective trust items and four cognitive trust items, given before and after the experiment as measures of baseline trust and situational trust. Communication process was analyzed by coding videotape transcriptions. Results showed that video did not affect performance, but it appeared to matter in the trust perception, with the Chinese trusting their partners less if they communicated only over the audio channel than the video channel. The analysis of communication process revealed different communication style for Chinese and Americans, and provided more detailed information regarding their negotiation activities. For example, Chinese pairs had more activities on building up negotiation contexts than American pairs. The study also showed that video changed the negotiation process by allowing more informal communication behavior and slowing down the communication flow than the audio channel. The lack of video on performance confirmed the common ground theory that video benefits people with little common ground.