Negotiators’ Attitudes toward Signing Business Contracts: Evidence from Greece and Israel

Abstract

This study extends beyond negotiation process and styles, and focuses on negotiators' tendency to sign formal contracts. Drawing on a risk mitigation perspective, it examines the infl uence of businesspeople's levels of horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism, ethical idealism, and trust propensity on their attitudes toward signing formal negotiated business contracts in Greece and in Israel. A survey questionnaire was translated from English to Greek and to Hebrew, and 649 responses were collected from employees who worked in industries such as banking, insurance, construction, manufacturing, retailing, and tourism in the Greek and Israeli private and public sectors. Our fi ndings suggest that higher levels of horizontal individualism, horizontal collectivism, and ethical idealism increase employees' tendency to sign formal contracts, whereas lower levels of general trust are associated with a higher propensity to sign formal contracts. Interestingly, employees' propensity to sign formal contracts was signifi cantly lower in Israel than in Greece. We argue that the propensity to sign formal contracts, and thus to mitigate potential agreement risks, is dependent on the individuals' cultural and personal attributes. The study provides practitioners with a set of cultural and individual attributes that can serve as predictors of negotiators' predisposition toward signing business contracts.

Socio-cultural capital in the Arab workplace: wasta as a moderator of ethical idealism and work engagement

“…Ethical idealism has been reported to have an inverse relationship with the endorsement of ethically questionable behavior in negotiations (Banai et al. , 2014; Stefanidis and Banai, 2014) and in other aspects of doing business (Stefanidis et al. , 2015).…”

Formal international contracts in the presence of cultural distance: An empirical analysis of biopharmaceutical alliances

“…On the other hand, recent literature shows a systematic relationship between a country's institutional environment and the design of venture contracts (e.g., Lerner & Schoar, ; Stefanidis, Banai, & Shetach, ), revealing that contract designs reflect the regional and national cultures in which the firms are located (Bengtsson & Ravid, ; Teegen & Doh, ). Comparing national and international contracts, other researchers such as Ryall and Sampson () find that contracts for cross‐border deals tend to be more detailed.…”