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Pervasive forms of worldwide communication now connect us instantly and constantly, and yet we all too often fail to understand each other. Rather than benefiting from our globally interconnected reality, the world continues to fall back on divisiveness, a widening schism exacerbated by some of the most pronounced divisions in history along lines of wealth, culture, religion, ideology, class, gender, and race. Cross-cultural dynamics are rife within multinational organizations and among people who regularly work with people from other cultures. This chapter reviews what we know from our scholarship on cross-cultural interaction among expatriates, negotiators, and teams that work in international contexts. Perhaps more important, this chapter outlines what we need to learn – and to unlearn – to be able to see diversity as an asset in helping individuals, organizations, and society to succeed rather than continuing to understand it primarily as a source of problems.

Purpose — This chapter focuses on trust-building between American and Chinese business negotiators in the U.S.–Chinese collaborative projects through the work of ethnic Chinese employees. These ethnic Chinese employees can be effective trust-builders who can prevent dishonest behaviors in negotiations and implementations of projects in China through adequate corporate policies and training.Design/methodology/approach — The data were collected through semi-structured personal in-depth interviews through years 1994–2004 in the United States and in Hong Kong. The data were further validated by the author’s recent six years of field work in mainland China (2006–2011).Findings — The work explains how 36 Chinese expatriates in the United States and 24 Chinese executives in Hong Kong established trust between the U.S. negotiators coming from an individualistic, goal-oriented, low-context culture with a mature market economy and a well-established legal system and Chinese negotiators coming from a collectivistic, relationship-oriented, power-driven, high-context culture with an emerging market economy and an embryonic legal system. Many Chinese expatriates and executives have learned to entwine affect-based trust (feeling) and cognitive-based trust (information) with the Chinese representatives but cannot convey the affect-based trust to the relationships between American and Chinese representatives. Many Chinese expatriates and executives can use their affect-based trust to ask for reciprocity from the Chinese representatives and discern how to leverage on valid information provided by both sides. The social consequences of breaking affect-based trust relationships in the context of the Chinese culture are well above the norms to facilitate honest relationships between the U.S.–Chinese collaborative projects. The affect-based trust between ethnic Chinese employees and Chinese negotiators is transferred to defer dishonest behaviors in negotiations and projects when these ethnic Chinese employees perceive to have authority to mobilize American corporate resources in the negotiation processes.Social implications — American corporations need to enhance the effectiveness of their ethnic Chinese employees as valuable honesty builders in negotiations and implementations of projects in China, where there are weak institutional policies and structures to punish dishonest organizational practices.Originality/value — It is important for American corporations to develop a shared understanding between American representatives and their ethnic Chinese employees in the context of U.S.–Chinese cooperative project negotiations through corporate policies and training programs before a team of American representatives is formed.

Purpose – In this chapter, we propose a process model of emergent multiculturally shared mental models (MSMM) in multiparty negotiation.

Methodology – Building on existing models of collective cognition, we incorporate our research on culture, negotiation, and shared mental models to propose a three-stage model that addresses the unique challenges of a multiparty and multicultural context at each stage.

Implications – The challenges of multiparty negotiation (e.g., increased information load, managing coalitions, etc.) are exacerbated in a multicultural context because negotiators each bring unique approaches and expectations that are grounded in their national cultural values and norms. Our model addresses these complexities and illustrates moderators that can facilitate or hinder the development of a shared understanding in multicultural multiparty negotiation.

Originality – Multicultural multiparty negotiations are common in international business mergers, international peace keeping efforts, and international political, economic, and environmental treaties. This chapter is the first to consider the process of shared cognition in the context of multicultural multiparty negotiations.

This paper aims at advancing research on the identification and the first test of the primary steps companies follow to generate and maintain enablers of long-term marketing relationships in cross-cultural business. To achieve the objective, the authors first identify the communication difficulties in generating and maintaining long-term relationships in bi-cultural or multi-cultural settings. They then develop the building blocks, or enablers, that are needed to form and maintain enduring relationships. They finally illustrate the suggested process by describing the use of enablers in two contrasting cultures, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin, using samples from the United States and Chile, respectively.

This paper discusses national differences in the interpretation of time in mixed motive decision contexts, such as negotiation. Specifically, we consider how members of different national cultures (Portugal, Turkey, and the United States) experience temporality in these situations. We argue that cultural temporality such as polychronicity, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance form part of a broader national environment. The national environment is also expressed in national stability factors such as legal systems, family ties, and homogeneity of populations. We propose that temporality and stability aspects of national environment determine negotiation paradigms, which subsequently influence temporality in negotiations. We conclude by suggesting that inclusion of complex and interdependent national environment factors in the study of negotiation has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of mixed motive decision situations.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to introduce new methods to behavioral research on group negotiation.

Design/methodology/approach – We describe three techniques from the field of Machine Learning and discuss their possible application to modeling dynamic processes in group negotiation: Markov Models, Hidden Markov Models, and Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Although negotiation research has employed Markov modeling in the past, the latter two methods are even more novel and cutting-edge. They provide the opportunity for researchers to build more comprehensive models and to use data more efficiently. To demonstrate their potential, we use scenarios from group negotiation research and discuss their hypothetical application to these methods. We conclude by suggestions for researchers interested in pursuing this line of work.

Originality/value – This chapter introduces methods that have been successfully used in other fields and discusses how these methods can be used in behavioral negotiation research. This chapter can be a valuable guide to researchers that would like to pursue computational modeling of group negotiation.