Negotiating in Different Cultures: are Western Personality Dimensions Relevant in Chinese Culture?

Abstract

In recent years, negotiation scholars have studied the effects of culture on negotiation as well as the effects of personality. This paper combines these two streams of research, and asks the question: Are the effects of personality on negotiation the same in a high-context, collectivist as they are in a low-context, individualistic culture? We develop predictions about differential effects of agreeableness and extraversion on negotiation in American and Chinese cultural contexts, and test them with data collected in Taiwan and the U.S. We also test whether western personality constructs (the Big Five) are useful in a Chinese context, compared to indigenously developed Chinese personality constructs. Our findings indicate that Chinese are more vulnerable to anchoring than Americans, that agreeableness and extraversion are not predictors of anchoring among Chinese (as they are among Americans), and that the Chinese personality constructs of Ren Qing, Face, and Harmony do affect negotiations in ways that can not be seen when just using the Big Five.

Keywords: Personality, cross-cultural comparison, negotiation