Face-to-Face, Phone or E-mail?

The empirical study of how communications media affects individuals' definitions of the negotiation, especially in an era of expanding communications possibilities, is also drawing the interest of researchers. Should you meet face-to-face, bargain by phone or resort to e-mail? The answer, researchers say, is, it depends.
"The technology we use to negotiate affects our definition of the negotiation game and the behavior deemed appropriate for the interaction," write Bazerman, Valley et al.
Generally, face-to-face meetings foster rapport and offer fewer openings for misunderstanding and deceit. If both parties are already familiar to each other, however, face-to-face meetings may not be necessary. And if tensions are already high, then negotiating by phone may be the best choice, so as to reduce the possibility of pressure tactics.
E-mail is a tricky new area. Since e-mail lacks what researchers call social context cues, it allows more "talk time" for all, and this dimension of egalitarianism may make for a more fruitful exchange. There is a downside, though, because e-mail also seems to make people less inhibited in a negotiation scenario. If the negotiation is already tense, this lack of inhibition can make a bad situation worse.
One study found, for example, that among 24 four-person decision making groups interacting via computer, there were 102 instances of rude or impulsive behavior. Another 24 groups that interacted in person yielded only 12 remarks of that nature.
Crossing Cultures
Negotiating across cultures is cited in the article as being "akin to a dance in which one person does a waltz and another a tango." So what can negotiators do to make the process a little more graceful?
The group outlines recent experiments that focus on two areas: differences in the negotiation game between cultures, and how negotiators might change their game (or even their mental models) to bring about better negotiation.
In the first area, research has focused most actively on the cultural dimension referred to as "individualism-collectivism." This research has revealed, for instance, that negotiators from certain cultures—i.e. United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands—seem more concerned with maintaining individual rights, while others—from Colombia, Pakistan, Taiwan, for example—focus more on preserving relationships. The first group is more likely to resort to competition and problem solving in the negotiation, while the second prefers more indirect means of arriving at a solution.
Less research attention to date has addressed three other important dimensions of cross-cultural interaction. These include power distance (how social hierarchies affect negotiation), context of communication (the degree to which messages inherit meaning from the setting in which they are delivered), and different conceptions of time (whether negotiators from certain cultures prefer to handle issues in a sequential or simultaneous fashion).
Other research suggests that negotiators might deliberately change the negotiation game across cultures, either by transcending their own cultural background or by having opponents jointly follow the culture with which both negotiators are most familiar. While these are reasonable ideas in theory, the jury is still out on whether or not they are viable for the typical negotiator.
Negotiation with More Than Two Players
As the number of parties in a negotiation increases, the complexity of the dispute expands rapidly. New research is studying how this complexity affects the negotiation and suggests ways to transcend the confusion.
Negotiators might make the problem work better for everyone by applying certain rules, such as controlling participants' opportunities to speak or specifying how the group will make a decision (via majority rule, unanimity, etc). Many of these methods, however, also place constraints on the negotiation since they prevent people from learning enough about each other's interests to strive for the best possible outcome.
Experiments also indicate, however, that negotiating teams can have distinct advantages, including enhanced capability to exchange information and generate high quality ideas.
A Sub-Field No Longer
As laboratory researchers, write Bazerman, Valley, Curhan and Moore, they are "sympathetic to the constraints of the laboratory methodology" and cognizant of how important it can be to understand how their participants redefine the game.
"Most negotiation experiments are easiest to create when it is in the power of the researcher to specify the game," the group writes. "Unfortunately, this researcher specification may have inhibited the study of how negotiators psychologically define the game."
The psychological study of negotiation, once a mere sub-field of social psychology, can now draw on a wealth of work throughout many different segments of psychology: social psychology, cognitive psychology, behavior decision research, and clinical psychology. It may well also benefit from preliminary studies in how physiological factors can affect negotiation.
As the group points out in their conclusion, "We hope that these multiple lenses can create a more unified understanding, so that psychology can help the world overcome barriers to effective negotiation behavior."