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Ethical Decision Making in Negotiation: A Sino-Australian Study of the Influence of Culture

This thesis presents the results of three studies that extend understanding of ethical decision making in negotiation. First, by comparing how Chinese and Australian negotiators think about contextual variables in an interpretive study, an extended model of ethical decision making in negotiation is offered. This study suggested differences in how codes of ethics and perception of the other party were understood as well as a shared understanding of the influence of the legal environment across the two cultures. Importance of organisational goals and personal and business reputation also emerged as important variables in negotiators' ethical decision making. The next study began testing the extended model with an investigation of the interaction between culture and closeness of the relationship with the other party using the SINS scale (Robinson, Lewicki, & Donahue, 2000). It was found that Chinese negotiators generally rated ethically ambiguous negotiation tactics as more appropriate than Australians, and that Chinese differentiated more in their ratings of appropriateness according to the social context. In the test for metric equivalence of the SINS scale, this study found that the existing approach of inductively deriving types of ethically ambiguous negotiation tactics based on ratings of perceived appropriateness is flawed since patterns of ratings are likely to vary across groups of negotiators. In light of this, a new typology of ethically ambiguous negotiation tactics is offered based on an a priori identification of conceptually distinct types of tactics. This new inventory of items represents the first step in the process of producing a cross-culturally generalisable scale of ethically ambiguous negotiation tactics.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/264837
Date January 2003
CreatorsRivers, Cheryl Janet
PublisherQueensland University of Technology
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
Detected LanguageEnglish
RightsCopyright Cheryl Janet Rivers

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