We collected a sample of 167 employees from the travel agency industry in Taiwan a few weeks after a tragic incident that involved the loss of twenty-two individuals from two travel groups due to large-scale landslides. We predicted, and found, that the more the respondents empathized with the...

You are leading a negotiating team for your company. When you sit down with the other party, someone on your side of the table blurts out: "Just tell us-what do we need to do to get more of your business?" And in that moment, you know you've lost the upper hand. Gaffes like this are more common...

This study extends prior research on conflict in teams by showing that a team's chances of appropriately managing one type of conflict depends on what other types of conflicts are co-occurring. We interviewed 44 managers from different industries who had recently participated in a negotiating...

We examined how the cultural dimension of universalism–particularism influences managers' attitudes toward relational favoritism (such as favoring friends or relatives in HR decisions). Paradoxically, we found in a survey study that Brazilian and Chinese managers perceived more negative...

We use politeness theory to predict how language may affect dispute resolution between sellers and buyers of goods purchased on-line. We expect that negative face threats will have a stronger impact than positive face threats on subjects in individualistic cultures, but that the reverse would be...

As companies look for better ways to manage diversity, one of the approaches that is emerging is the use of female and minority network groups. These groups are not well understood, and there has been no quantitative analysis of their impact on minority employees. Social network theory suggests...

Ethnographic research offers an alternative approach which can provide insights into the types of complex sitnations that negotiators really face. This approach is not easy - it can be more time consuming, costly, and difficult than other research methods - but the payoff comes from the way...

This paper develops an expectancy model for Chinese-American differences in conflict-avoiding, and tests this model using a scenario study with respondents from Taiwan and the US. Our results show that a higher Chinese tendency to avoid conflict is explained by higher Chinese expectations that...