E-Mails from the East: dE-Humanizing or E-mpowering

Posted By Jonasz Ely-Rubik, Nov 12, 2013

Made in China

These three little words are fairly ubiquitous in our consumer culture.  Savvy intercontinental business requires negotiating not only across continents, but also across cultures.  The relative ease of e-mail negotiation may end up costing US businesses a lot of money in the long run.  While it may seem foolish to send someone halfway around the world for a transactional negotiation, removing your face and handshake from the picture could give significant clout to the other side.  In short, the de-personalization stemming from e-mail negotiation helps a Chinese businessperson avoid social closeness that may otherwise reign in their position.  Furthermore, social nuances are often obfuscated or entirely missed in the e-mail transmission.  These effects compound, and should give the cautious US businessperson pause.

E-Mail Effects

Negotiating via e-mail tends to have two discernible consequences.   First, the lack of physical proximity causes a decrease in social awareness.  The opposing negotiator becomes more of an abstracted impediment than a living and breathing business partner.  The temporal tag-game of e-mail causes a lack of synchronicity in the negotiation.  You never know when you’re going to get a reply, and you have enough (too much?) time to craft your answers.  Research shows that this increases inflammatory remarks and hinders the establishment of trust between negotiators.  This subsequently reduces collaboration.  Furthermore, the e-mail medium may induce overly competitive behavior and even stymie appropriate disclosure. Risks become less daunting when there’s no human being in front of you.  Short story, it’s much easier to be a jerk to someone behind a computer screen.   Secondly, e-mail throttles the “social bandwidth” of the interaction.  Nuances are lost to the electronic ether.  You can’t “read” the other person while reading their e-mail.  This decrease in social information generally releases inhibitions and allows negotiators to be more competitive. 

Unleashing the Dragon

Research suggests that Chinese culture places a high value on maintaining social harmony within its society.  This is not mirrored in the competitive/cutthroat approach to social interaction in the US.  Here, survival of the fittest generally permeates our experience.  We have already examined how e-mail may suppress social cues, and therefore cultural pressures.  Recent research describes a large “reactance effect” when e-mails are used for negotiation in China.  Put simply, when cultures are focused on harmony, they are more likely to run rampant in the hypo-socialized world of e-mail. Viewing this through the lens of negotiation, the use of e-mail can make Chinese negotiators far more aggressive than they might be in person.  Since research indicates that aggressive offers generally garner tangible benefits, beware Chinese sellers who use e-mail as the means of communication.  They may be inclined to push the limits of their initial offer further behind a shield of impersonal electrons.  The US e-mail negotiator sees less deviation from in-person interaction because our culture is somewhat more competitive initially.  Since we move less far from baseline when using e-mail, our “reactance” is smaller.

Human Cost, Human Benefit

The simple way to counter this predicament is to send a person to China when you need to negotiate a distributive deal.  The cost of sending a human may well offset the benefit conferred upon a Chinese company by e-mail negotiation.  Research must be put into practice, and knowledge of cultural dichotomies helps negotiators adjust their strategies. Another idea may be video chatting, where you have a real-time image of another human being in front of you.  Nuance is the palette of the artful negotiator.  Don’t throw that away by reducing the negotiation to black and white pixels frozen in time.

This blog was inspired by research presented on cross-cultural e-mail negotiations: Rosette et al., When Cultures Clash Electronically: The Impact of Email and Social Norms on Negotiation Behavior and Outcomes, 43 J. of Cross-Cultural Psychol., 628 (2012)..