|
Faculty
Research: Professor Jeanne Brett, MORS
A choreographer's
cues
Jeanne
Brett's research taps into the 'dance' of global negotiations
By
Romi Herron
Imagine
two brilliant dancers, one an expert in fox trot, the other
in salsa. Each performer's style is technically flawless,
yet in tandem the pair does nothing but crush one another's
toes.
Enter
a master choreographer, keenly sensitive to each artist's
tempo, expression, style and conditioning. With her direction,
the dancers achieve shared rhythm, coordinated footwork, harmony
and new inspiration.
On
the cross-cultural negotiations stage, the players are similarly
challenged to converge despite strong differences in behavior
and communication style.
In "The Negotiation Dance: Time, Culture, and
Behavioral Sequences in Negotiation," Kellogg School
Professor Jeanne
Brett (with Professor Wendi Adair of Cornell University)
presents the intricate patterns of international negotiation,
providing insights designed to encourage sure-footedness.
"Negotiating
cross culturally presents many challenges," says the
DeWitt W. Buchanan Jr. Professor of Dispute Resolution, who
joined Kellogg in 1976, "but one of the most important
is how people communicate information about their preferences
and priorities."
Brett
notes that negotiators from low-context cultures, those that
tend to take spoken words at face value, as in the U.S., typically
gain information about the other's preferences by asking and
answering questions. In contrast, negotiators from high-context
cultures, those in which people infer additional meaning that
may be implied but not directly stated, common in China, India
and Japan, frequently keep mental tallies of offers throughout
the process. "It's important for negotiators from low-context
cultures to learn to read information from the offer patterns
of the other side, so as not to be at a disadvantage when
a negotiator is reluctant to share information directly,"
notes the professor, who also is director of the Kellogg Dispute
Resolution Research Center and has authored more than
50 articles and four books, including Negotiating Globally.
"The
Negotiation Dance," published in Organization Science
in 2005, presents a model that Brett teaches her students,
to facilitate tracking offers, infer preferences and priorities
and record a visual picture of the progress of the negotiation.
Experiential
learning in Brett's class helps train students to reach the
core of differences between negotiators and find resolution
of those differences.
Simulations used in Brett's cross-cultural negotiation
class are similar to those used in the regular Kellogg negotiations
class: students assume a role, prepare and then negotiate
with a counterpart.
What's
different in the cross-cultural class, says Brett, is who
is at the negotiation table. One's counterpart may be a government official, a representative
of environmental interests or simply another private sector
company, but one embedded in a different social, political
and economic environment.
Brett,
who initiated the Kellogg negotiating class in 1981, notes
the subject's continual growth, along with the field of international
negotiations, since then.
Seventeen students enrolled in her class the first
year; 75 signed up a year later.
In 1997, Kellogg launched its cross-cultural negotiations
offering.
"Back
in 1981, we weren't sure where the program was headed, but
[Dean Emeritus] Don
Jacobs had a pattern of 'watering the flowers' to see
what would grow. He
wanted to give the students what they were looking for,"
Brett recalls.
Students'
interest and receptiveness to the negotiations training Brett
seeded more than two decades ago is clearly blossoming: Today,
Kellogg offers 24 sections of the class.
Brett's
research has flourished too, extending to audiences in Japan,
France and China. Scheduled for the choreographer's summer
routine is her production of a CD to accompany the revised
edition of Negotiating Globally, the scholar's response
to international acclaim and her publisher's request for an
encore.
|
