Background

Globalisation has led to increasing importance of creation and maintenance of new buyer-supplier relationships across borders. This has resulted into to an increased focus on the importance of good negotiation skills and competences amongst business teams in order to communicate efficiently and maintain long term relationships in cross-cultural business contexts. These skills and competences have attracted the attention of academicians, who introduced cultural intelligence - a concept that looks at capabilities of interacting in cross-cultural environment.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to identify the presence of cultural intelligence during negotiations and to explain its relation to various negotiation tactics.Frame of referenceThe scope of this research includes academic literature on long-term buyer-supplier relationships while focusing on cross-cultural aspects of such dealings. A major part of the literature review focuses on the concept of cultural intelligence, followed by a discussion of the negotiation process and tactics.

Methodology

For the purpose of this qualitative study an inductive research approach was used. A series of experiments were conducted and observation was the major source of data collection, supplemented with focus group interviews, in order to gain deeper insights into participants´ behaviours during the negotiations. The empirical findings were analysed using a qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA.

Conclusion

Cultural intelligence was identified in the different stages of the negotiation process and its relation to various negotiation tactics was explained based on co-occurrence of these tactics and evidence of culturally intelligent behaviour. This paper sheds light on application of each dimension of cultural intelligence to particular negotiation tactics. We particularly highlight the high level of adaptability and a visibly strong link between three CQ dimensions: metacognitive, motivational and behavioural and three negotiation tactics: active listening, bluffing and relationship focus. This study can perhaps be particularity useful for organizations that use the cross-functional team approach as these teams can be formed according to the CQ strengths of participants, thereby improving the team´s cultural awareness and ability to perform during cross-cultural negotiations.