Cross-cultural Negotiation: Ireland-Germany (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, Dublin Institute of Technology, course: International Business and Languages, language: English, abstract: Why do business negotiations often go wrong, although English is a widely and well spoken business language? Successful communication depends not only on the level of language; it is predetermined by the cultural knowledge, values and norms. Only when going abroad or meeting other cultures, people may step out of their selfreference criteria and are able to become aware of their own as well as the other's culture. Everything that used to be normal with regarding to behaviour, attitude and values, and therefore someone was unaware of in their own culture, suddenly becomes strangely embedded in a newly occurring situation.

In spite of a huge amount of literature available about cross-cultural communication, there is little useful information, which is applicable to practical and specific situations like Irish-German negotiations. Especially, it is very difficult to acquire empirical data from negotiation processes as the influences of a third person have a considerable effect on the other communication partners' actions and thus the value of the process is degraded.

The usage of cultural dimensions from Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hall are widely quoted and used for putting cultures into categories. In the meantime, these dimensions lack examples regarding the behaviour of cultures in certain situations. Mostly, they fail to explain the reasons for cultural behaviour, which refer to the underlying values, norms and beliefs. In addition to some of these dimensions, I will make use of communication styles and social custom in order to describe likely situation where tension between Irish and German negotiations can arise. But what is more, I will try to explain the reasons for these incidents. These explanations should give the reader a further understanding of both cultures' values. As I am a Germannative speaker, there may be a little bias in the explanations regarding the German cultural values.