Negotiations: Theory & Practice
Cultural Diversity in Negotiations

It has been said that the Japanese often find United States negotiators as difficult to understand, because “unlike Japanese, the Americas are not racially or culturally homogenous”(1). Reading this statement is what lead me to write on Cultural Diversity in regards to Negotiations. What I have found is that while it is difficult to characterize any national or cultural approach to negotiations, generalizations are frequently drawn. While these generalizations are helpful it is essential to remember that they are only guidelines and not hard and fast rules. What I have found in my research is that any generalization will apply to some of the members of a group, some of the time. A great personal example is to consider a few generalizations about one or two groups that you currently belong to. In this report, some generalizations about cultural and national approaches to negotiation will be outlined. If negotiators understand that their counterparts may be seeing things differently than themselves, they will be less likely to make negative judgments and more likely to make progress in negotiations and this is why I think cultural diversity is so important to be aware of before walking into a negotiation. We will start out with the time orientations of monochronic and polychromic approaches across cultures. . Monochronic approaches to time are linear, sequential and involve focusing on one thing at a time (2). These approaches are most common in the European-influenced cultures of the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Japanese people also tend toward this end of the time continuum. Polychronic orientations to time involve simultaneous events of many things and the involvement of many people (2).
Negotiators from polychronic cultures tend to:
• Start and end meetings