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intercultural negotiation

Body Language

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

From Facial Expressions to Body Movements

The body speaks, expresses emotions and feelings. Even attempts to block these emotions and feelings are themselves “meta messages”, seeing a person expressing no emotion, acting as an “emotional mummy“, is itself a signal that leads to specific reflections. Body language concerns:

  • facial expressions and facial expressions;
  • nods of the head;
  • the movements of the limbs and gestures;
  • body movements and distances;
  • touch and physical contact.

Cultural differences on these points can be very large. Cultures vary a lot on the type of gestures. In an Italian-Chinese negotiation, clear differences can be seen between the Italian gestures (on average wider) and the Chinese one, more contained, as well as in the facial expressions, more evident for Italy and more contained for China.

A negotiator operating in China can therefore choose to contain their gestures and their emotional expression, to “dampen” the stereotypical image associated with their culture, or rather increase it theatrically, to “play a part” and amplify their stereotypical identity. . There are no golden rules on what is best to do, each choice is strategic and linked to the context of the moment, to “contextual appropriateness“.

Physical contact is one of the most critical and difficult elements to deal with on an intercultural level. While some Western standards of physical contact are spreading throughout the business community (eg: shaking hands), each culture expresses a different degree of contact in greetings and interactions. Managing hugs, kisses, touching the body, knowing who can touch whom, remains a difficult point, to be solved above all by resorting to an analysis of the local culture. In general, if it is not possible to gather accurate information from local culture experts, it is advisable to limit physical contact in order not to generate a sense of invasiveness.

Personal Distances

Proxemics defines “the observations and theories concerning the use of human space, understood as a specific elaboration of culture” (Hall, 1988). In his studies, Hall highlights how distances are a highly cultural elaboration, and are managed by each culture in a different way. On the negotiation front, the implications are numerous: being close to or far from the interlocutor is a precise negotiating message.

Standing in front or to the side, or even on the same side, is another form of message. Every culture has unwritten rules for delimiting the boundaries of acceptability of interpersonal distances and people’s dispositions. Also in this case, the principle of resorting to the knowledge of experts of the local culture is valid, while a valid rule in case of lack of knowledge is to let the counterpart define their own degree of distance, without forcing neither an approach nor a removal.

The main awareness to develop is that of the “critical distance” (Hall), which defines the interpersonal distance within which a subject feels vulnerable, exposed to the risks of aggression. Human critical distances have an animal basis and a strong cultural variance, with Arab and Latin cultures often more “close” and Anglo-Saxon cultures very “distant”.

Personal distance is like “an invisible bubble that surrounds the body” Beyond the intra-cultural rules, some attitudes relating to distances are transversal to cultures because they are anchored to the human animal root. For example, “leaving your seat”, giving space to someone, is a tool for assigning status and recognizing the importance of the interlocutor. As Hall points out: stronger, superior individuals tend to establish greater personal distances than the specimens occupying lower positions in the social hierarchy, while it is known that weaker, subordinate animals give way to superior animals.

Therefore, at an intercultural level, “leaving the place” will be a move towards rapprochement, a recognition of status. For the conscious negotiator, it is not to be understood as pure submission, but it can also take on the function of a tactical move, an act of relational courtesy that precedes the actual negotiation confrontation. Making people uncomfortable, on the contrary, is used to establish great distances.

Some negotiators use tactics specifically aimed at upsetting the emotional balance of the subject, making people wait in excessively hot and narrow waiting rooms, without bathrooms or with distant services, for a long time – it is an example of a breakthrough move. Especially when the subject has made a long journey, the temptation to leave will be blocked by the thought of having made a useless journey, and of any repercussions.

The appropriate tactic is to require a higher degree of comfort, but only if you have the almost mathematical certainty that a specific move is underway, and those are not the real maximum reception conditions that the subject is able to offer. The frontal disposition of people is generally considered confrontational, while on the side it is considered more collaborative, and on the same side “between equals“. As Hall points out, “every animal needs a critical space, without which its survival is impossible”. In terms of negotiations, the space to be considered is both environmental and psychological.

Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Role Theories and Communication of the Leadership Role

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

Cooperative Dialogue (Cooperative Interaction)

Being the leader of a family means being able to act as a “guide” of the family itself, and this is expressed in group and individual conversations with family members. Being the leader of a production department means assuming the role of reference point for all technicians, managing to manage conflicts, meetings, training and motivational processes.

Being the leader of a sales force means taking on the role of mentor and coordinator of resources and strategies, and applying the role in every communication with your collaborators. Regardless of which corporate or social reference group is, leadership must be considered a meta-role that transversally invests a subject within a group of individuals.

The assumption of the role is evident in the method of communication adopted, and its lack is equally evident. As Tonfoni points out, each role is charged with expectations and role behaviors: According to the Theory of Roles, a certain sequence of planned actions, called “role”, refers to the individual actors who occupy certain positions within one or more groups, within which there is a balance determined by the fact that at each “status “separate functions are assigned.

Based on the dynamics of the role, each individual must correspond to relative expectations; the role is therefore definable as a model of social behavior appropriate in relation to the expectations and the actual way in which an individual behaves in a certain situation. Failure to respect expectations and role behaviors is evident precisely in the inter-individual and group conversation in which the subject does not act as a “private individual” but as an “interpreter of the role of leader”.

Leadership therefore requires attention to the communicative listening dynamics in which they manifest themselves:

  • attacks on the role by team members;
  • improper role assumptions by team members or other subjects;

The correlated communicative behaviors are therefore:

  • reporting of the leader’s perception of the attack on the role;
  • clarification of the facts, making it clear that it is understood what is happening.
  • defense of the role;
  • negotiation of mutual roles. Leadership move detection exercise
  • Simulate starting a project to build a new product (banking, automobile, tourism, or others of your choice) that requires joint work between engineers, marketing experts and management control and finance experts.
  • Have all the participants start the dialogue in turn, with the requirement that those who open the negotiation try to be the leader.
  • Notice how during a conversation a participant taking an agreed role implements leadership. What to do to manage the power? Participants must decode the moves implemented by the assigned role, understand how the leader implements his leadership on the field.
  • In the debriefing phase (post-simulation analysis), provide feedback to the conversation leader on the effectiveness of the moves implemented.

Cooperative Dialogue (Cooperative Interaction)

The cooperative dialogue involves a strong concentration of positive moves, of openness, a use of SIM for analysis and sharing, and the elimination of attacks on the role and identity of others. The cooperative dialogue mainly consists of:

  • listening, avoiding interruption;
  • strategic shifts between the macro-purposes of the projects and the details, with a preference for macro-purposes and the search for a shared mission; consider the differences on the details as temporary, recoverable, and go in search of a common vision and what they have in common;
  • search for a win-win approach;
  • attitudes of openness and avoidance of the judgment of others (suspension of judgment until complete understanding).
Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Game Theories and Conversational Leadership

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

Elements of Negotiation Game Theory

The role of the leader requires a strong attention to the communicative games in progress, with the awareness that in organizations and in negotiation messages are not produced for poetic purposes but above all to manage power. As Tonfoni (2000) points out: On the other hand, considering the communicative model within Game Theory requires the prior clarification of the model itself, as well as of the objectives.

The actors, within the theory, as “players” precisely by designing and implementing sequences of actions aimed at achieving a pre-established goal. This end is constituted by the profit, since the theory is oriented to the behavior of a predominantly economic nature. The “actors” are also “verbal communicators“; as such, their actions must essentially be aimed at a prediction as exact as possible of sequences of actions and an explicit determination of the so-called “rules of the game“.

The actors operate through the implementation of appropriate strategies, aimed at achieving the goal or at opposing counter-strategies activated by the interlocutors, or by other individuals who take part in the communicative game.

The negotiator’s leadership includes the ability to:

  • Create specific thematic offers: throw non-random arguments on the conversation table, to see what the interlocutors’ reaction is; observe whether they pick up on the theme or let it go, and other possible moves by the interlocutor (diminish, accentuate, cling to the theme, enhance it, ignore it);
  • Manage the conversational format: which climate prevails during the negotiation? Are we facing a format of “interrogation”, of “search for a solution”, of “mutual confession”, or what else? If during a sales negotiation the seller notices that the buyer is adopting the “interrogation” format, the conversational leadership plans to point this out, with phrases such as “this conversation looks more like an interrogation than a search for solutions, we would like try to give our meeting a different, perhaps more productive cut ”;
  • Rebalance power relations: in sales, above all, there is an “unspoken” in which the purchaser holds the power to negotiate. This power is exercised through typical attitudes of those in power: control over content, deciding who speaks, what is spoken, and how it is spoken. Sometimes this results in unmotivated arrogance. Conversational leadership involves the ability to reformulate the games, rebalance attitudes, bring the two negotiators back to the same level, so as not to be crushed.

Tutorial: What game are you playing? Who holds the power?

Some communication situations of leadership and negotiation are presented, in which the leader implements a strategic communication game. Participants must evaluate what game is in progress and its intended purpose Some playable games:

  • Detection of theme offers (which topics of discussion the conductor offers);
  • Detection of the conversational format (which conversational climate tries to set the subject);
  • Detection of power relations (who commands over whom).
Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Cognitive Economics of Communication in Groups and Prioritization Skills

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

Deciding Priorities (What to Talk About) and Formats (How to Talk)

Cognitive economics deals with the efficient use of mental resources. An intercultural meeting poses high problems in the use of resources, since they must be divided and “absorbed” both by the debate on the contents and by the communication difficulties generated by linguistic and cultural differences.

The problems of cognitive economics therefore become even more pressing than intra-cultural meetings. We can therefore indicate that the use of time and resources becomes a meta-competence of the intercultural negotiator. Among his gifts are therefore the prioritization skills, the ability to set priorities, to be able to answer the fundamental question: what is good to talk about? How to manage scarce and limited time?

Each meeting has a high cost. Let’s simply try to calculate the hourly cost of many executives who spend a morning, arriving by plane from different countries, the cost of rooms and materials, the cost of preparation. Each group that comes together to achieve a goal may or may not give itself a strategy to optimize the resources deployed during the meeting. Intercultural prioritization skills require the negotiator to actively undertake to define which priorities to treat, thus also acting on the format of the negotiation, as well as to set the basic terms to be treated.

Defining which priorities to treat also means making very concrete choices: what to talk about first, what to talk about next. How to talk about it, with what approach, with what attitude. Other priorities concern the establishment of a positive conversational climate: without the right climate, any discussion on the contents becomes more difficult. For this, for example, it is necessary to understand that there is a precise relationship between climates and communication styles.

Some communication styles are deleterious to the achievement of a result, are diseconomic, dysfunctional, and must be grasped (in others), and avoided (for themselves). The subject of communication economics therefore requires:

1. Ability to recognize the (limited) attentional resources available for negotiation (resource awareness);

2. ability to understand the boundaries of time available (awareness of the times);

3. ability to move within these boundaries, deciding the most appropriate contents and recognizing the dispersive ones (awareness of strategic contents);

4. ability to manage the phases and times of the meetings (awareness of the interaction sequences)

5. ability to act on communication styles appropriate to the different phases, and on the attitudes underlying the styles of relationships (contextual awareness of communication styles).

The main themes of the economics of negotiation communication are highlighted in the following principle.

Principle 15 – Economics of communication and centering of negotiation

The quality of the negotiation depends on:

  • The ability to center the contents of the conversation;
  • The ability to manage one’s attention resources (attentional recharge and management of personal energies) and grasp the states of others;
  • Awareness of the time limits for negotiation;
  • The ability to segment negotiation times, distinguishing the negotiation phases and their specific objectives, in particular by mentally and de facto separating the listening time (empathy) and the proactive time;
  • The ability to modulate one’s own communication styles, breaking the communicative rigidity, knowing how to adapt the styles to the different phases, e.g. friend in the warming up and small talk phases (introductory chat), psychoanalytic in the empathic phases, assertive in the propositional phases, and other styles appropriate to the context.
Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Power and Conversation

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

Management of Conversational States

As the language “segments the world”, the conversation “segments the group” bringing out the relationships of strength and leadership. If language helps to build the perception of the world, conversation helps to create the relationships of power and leadership within the groups.

It is sufficient that a recall is ignored, to generate an immediate perception in the group on the type of power relations existing and generate a drastic drop in points in the leadership score (degree of conversational leadership of the subject). Let’s imagine the case of A (manager) and B (official), in which A states “I prefer that we do not continue further on this topic”, while B replies “yes, but …” continuing exactly on the subject.

The speech act of A “I prefer that we do not continue further on this topic” is a conversational move that fits within A’s line of communicative action called “assertive management of content and setting my role”. The linguistic act of B “yes but …” is a relational counter-move that can be framed in B’s communicative line of action “I don’t recognize you in the role of content manager and I continue on my way”.

If this mechanism is not resumed and sanctioned, A will immediately lose de facto leadership. The stratification of speech acts, conversational moves and related repercussions produces real leadership not inscribed in company or group documents, a leadership that is created in the daily reality of conversations.

Principle 14 – Management of conversational states

The quality of life in the work groups and the performance of the groups themselves are correlated:

  • the leader’s ability to grasp the ongoing conversational state (general recognition);
  • the leader’s ability to grasp dysfunctional conversational states (negative specific recognition), and practice negative reinforcement, intervene to restore functional states
  • the leader’s ability to grasp positive conversational states (specific positive recognition) and reinforce them.

The leader acts as coordinator, internal animator and controller of communication flows and conversational states, expressing his or her consent or dissent in key moments, for each team member, and exercising assertive control over them.

Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Negotiation Meetings, Conversational Leadership and Conversation Styles

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

Linguistic Acts, Communicative Lines of Action and Conversational Leadership

Each “issue with meaning“, within a negotiation, constitutes a linguistic act. Linguistic acts are always inserted within lines of communicative action and help to establish the type of relationship in progress (conflictual, collaborative, and others). Collaborating, keeping low tones, or clashing, arguing, are lines of action in which specific linguistic acts (such as attacking, or collaborating) intervene. Other communicative acts also take on meaning, for example emissions using non-verbal (body movement, gestures, looks) and paralinguistic (tones, pauses, silences, intonations) systems.

Intercultural Education for a Broader Perception in Negotiation

Let’s look at the more general point first. Within the research on psycholinguistics, Linguistic Relativism has shown how each language segments the world and allows us to see particular aspects. What does it mean that a language “segments the world”? In essence, linguistic categories guide perception, focusing the human mind on specific layers of reality and taking the attention away from others.

Eskimos have over 10 specific words for as many types of snow, and this guides perception through preset categories. Where this linguistic distinction does not exist, snow becomes a unique mental object, leaving the composition of sentences with a description of different types of snow. But still, in the Navajo language there is no word equivalent to the concept “late” (the perception of time is always relative), just as in the Amazonian languages ​​there is no word “snow”; in Mandarin Chinese, a single word (qing) represents various shades of both blue and green.

Linguistic accuracy therefore also depends on the availability of specific categories and vocabularies. Thus, a first work emerges which consists in educating the interlocutor to perceive differences. If an Eskimo wants to be able to make the European understand the difference between the ten types of snow, he will have to associate the word (verbal label) used with some recognizable representation (a photograph, or practical demonstration).

At the same time, in order to be able to negotiate, it is necessary to make the other understand the diversity between his or her culture and our culture. Each of the intercultural negotiators must be available to learn, available to train thanks to the encounter with the other. Negotiation on new products or on projects never implemented before requires a phase of acculturation, which enables the counterparty to orient, understand, and consciously choose within differences that they could not perceive before.

Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Tools and Methods for Intercultural Negotiation Effectiveness

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

The Basic Techniques Useful in Any Intercultural Context

Given the vastness of the field, we prefer to provide a first view of the areas and tools for solution, and then go into the examination of the different tools. Applying the tools to each individual intercultural situation (three of the over twenty listed) would require an entire book dedicated only to the specific situation. This volume lays the foundations for each general situation, leaving the consultancy with the tasks of adapting them to individual cases.

The basic techniques useful in any intercultural context are:

  • empathy and active listening: understanding in depth the behaviors, attitudes, emotions, thought systems of the interlocutor;
  • multi-level listening dynamics: the ability to disaggregate the multiple components of the message, to keep the communicative distance – and therefore the margin of misunderstanding – between the interlocutors “short“;
  • search for sharing of values ​​and results, win-win approach: evaluation of the “impossibility of not understanding each other” on some issues to build a win-win approach, in which both interlocutors can benefit from the negotiation. Starting from the consideration that in order to ask for a lot, one must worry about giving a lot;
  • grounded, experimental and role-playing approach: to test in the field, experiment and refine one’s communication strategies before putting them into action in situations of no return;
  • macro-cultural awareness: understanding the macro-foundations of the culture with which one interacts;
  • analysis of the context: understanding the intentions and goals of the interlocutor, the desired arrival point, the scenario in which he moves and how this affects him;
  • flexible negotiating platforms and adaptive lines of action: building flexible negotiating spaces in which to be able to move;
  • micro-cultural awareness: understanding the cultural dimension hidden and not very evident in the manifestations of the culture of our interlocutor;
  • diagnosis and stratification of the communicator: disaggregate the multiple components of messages to understand which messages are attributable to the culture of origin of our interlocutor, which to his individual personality, which to the role played and which to other contextual factors;
  • emotional centering and removal of the psychological background noise (Mental Noise): prepare to negotiate with a spirit of analysis, attention, free from prejudices; knowing how to free oneself from physical and psychological stress, in order to give the best possible negotiation performance.
Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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intercultural negotiation

Areas of Application of Intercultural Negotiation

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

The Effects of Globalization

Intercultural negotiation is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon due to globalization and the intensification of inter-ethnic, inter-religious, international, business, cultural or social relations. Remaining in the business field, the cases in which intercultural negotiation becomes more evident are:

  • 1. Selling abroad in neighboring cultures and distant cultures.
  • 2. Buying abroad or building supply management agreements, negotiating with foreign suppliers.
  • 3. Business agreements for the distribution of goods or services abroad
  • 4. Joint ventures (construction of companies managed by several partners of different nationalities) for production facilities abroad.
  • 5. Mergers between companies and acquisitions of companies in which the organizational cultures of origin are substantially different (as occurs in almost all cases, both at an intra-national level and at the level of international acquisitions and mergers).
  • 6. Manage the workforce in third countries.
  • 7. Manage the foreign workforce operating in your company.
  • 8. Do multinational training, training programs involving human resources operating in different countries.
  • 9. Intercultural training: cultural diversity between the trainer and the participants, or cultural diversity within the group of students.
  • 10. Coordinate international working groups.
  • 11. Diplomatic negotiation and international agreements.
  • 12. Peacekeeping, peacekeeping, conflict prevention and resolution.
  • 13. International contracts, cross-cultural legal negotiation.

On the mediated communications front, we see the urgency of an intercultural approach whenever problems arise in:

  • 14. Information communication campaigns in distant cultures.
  • 15. Advertising communication spread in different cultures and on international markets.
  • 16. Creation of persuasive and promotional messages on an international scale.
  • 17. Development of product concepts of international significance, destined to operate on global and different markets.
  • 18. Concept development of products aimed solely at a linguistic-cultural area, whose design takes place in a different starting culture.
  • 19. Build distribution and sales structures in different countries.
  • 20. Create personnel incentive and motivation systems appropriate to the local culture. On the social front, instead, we see an urgency of intercultural negotiation and communication skills when addressing the following issues:
  • 21. Scholastic integration of foreign children.
  • 22. Intercultural psychological therapy and intercultural counseling.
  • 23. Dynamics of ethnic adaptation.
  • 24. Interreligious dialogue.
  • 25. International development projects.
  • 26. Social communication campaigns (public health, disease prevention, nutrition education, drugs, and others) conducted in culturally diverse areas.

Over twenty areas of strong and urgent problematic characterize the field of intercultural communication. The vastness and severity of the underlying problems – in this incomplete list – highlights the urgency of a high level of attention to the dynamics of intercultural communication.

Intercultural Negotiation Arab Edition

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or any other language, or seek Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching, Mentoring and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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