Searching for trustworthiness: culture, trust and negotiating new business relationships

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to address three important but under-researched questions in the trust and negotiation literature: What do negotiators do to determine the trustworthiness of a potential business partner? What trust criteria motivate their search and help them interpret the information their search reveals? Whether there are systematic cultural differences in search and criteria, and if different, why? Design/methodology/approach This study used qualitative methodology. The data are from interviews with 82 managers from 33 different national cultures in four regions of the world identified by cultural levels of trust in negotiation and tightness-looseness. Interviews focused on how negotiators determined the trustworthiness of potential business partners in intracultural negotiations. Findings Analyses revealed four search activities negotiators use to gather information about a potential business partner: due diligence, brokerage, good will building and testing; and five criteria for determining the trustworthiness of a new business partner: respect, mutual values, competence, openness and professionalism. Quotes illustrate how these search activities and criteria manifest in different cultures. Research limitations/implications This study used multiple cases to build a longitudinal picture of the process. It did not follow a single case in depth. The study focused on identifying cultural central tendencies at the same time recognizing that there is always variability within a culture. Practical implications Knowing what is culturally normative allows negotiators to anticipate, interpret and respect their counterpart’s behavior. Such knowledge should facilitate trust development. Originality/value This study provides an in-depth understanding of cultural similarities and differences in the process of trust development in negotiating new business relationships.

Mapping societal trust and trust in negotiations

“…To make these behavioral adjustments, negotiators attempt to infer and diagnose whether their counterparts are trustworthy. Both academic research (Brett and Mitchell, 2019;Lu et al, 2017) and practical guidance (Gunia et al, 2014;Thompson, 2013) highlights the crucial role of inferring and diagnosing whether a negotiation counterpart is trustworthy.…”

“…Because of the disruption of normal supply chains, many companies sought new business partners whom they knew nothing about (Guan et al, 2020). In international negotiations, national identity is one strikingly important factor that managers may rely on to make trust inferences (Brett et al, 2017;Brett and Mitchell, 2019). IJCMA 32,5 826 Some scholars identify high-trust and low-trust nations (Fukuyama, 1995) and some projects aim to quantify trust in different nations (Inglehart et al, 2020), providing information about national levels of trust that managers may use when they prepare to negotiate with international counterparts with whom they are not personally acquainted (Brett and Mitchell, 2019).…”

Surviving trust from conflict in the construction industry: an interaction between conflict handling behaviors, behavioral outcomes, conflict and trust

“…There is a question about the respondents' experience of dealing with construction claims at the beginning of the questionnaire to scan for the qualified respondents. To maximize the similarity of participants' personal value orientation and mental schema, which are greatly influenced by national and organizational culture The theoretical framework of this study IJCMA 32,4 (Brett and Mitchell, 2019), only Chinese respondents working for Chinese companies were accessed.…”

The interaction effect of trust and contract on dispute negotiation strategy: evidence from the Chinese construction industry

“…When parties have expectations of continuity, competence trust gives one a sense of confidence that one can obtain long-term benefits from one's partners, and thus, performance risk will be perceived as being very low. The competence of partners in certain professional areas would also give one that the partners are trustworthiness (Brett and Mitchell, 2020). Although the high level of competence trust in partners may lead to an inferior position when disputes arise, the short-term inequities may yield long-term benefits (Anderson and Weitz, 1989), and parties tend to choose interest-based strategies that is consistent with the "cooperate and win" psychological framing, to solve disputes.…”