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Abstract: Increasing global stress during the era of COVID-19 compels the necessity of international cooperation skills to achieve a common goal within a limited time and effort through constructive negotiation. Therefore, training of 21st-century communication skills boosting international deals becomes increasingly essential. To promote awareness and train collaboration competencies, we developed serious games to simulate negotiation experiences and tested the games in two cultural settings: i.e., the Netherlands and Japan. Our negotiation games are to evaluate distributive aspects (zero-sum or win/lose) or the integrative aspects (win-win). We question whether the negotiator's positive self-judgment, the negotiation process, and the relationship between negotiators can predict negotiation performance. We also examine whether negotiation performance depends upon personal characteristics and cultural background of negotiators and their counterparts. Positive self-judgment among Japanese participants provided clues to predict negotiation performance (especially in distributive negotiations). Besides, we found a diverse impact of emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and emotional intelligence on negotiation performance. In the Netherlands, less agreeable and less extraverted negotiators achieved better outcomes when engaged in distributive negotiations. Emotionality and openness are detrimental to integrative negotiations. In Japan, emotional intelligence reduced negotiation performance. We provide practical recommendations for skill training based on the above findings.
Keywords: Social Value Indicator, personality, emotional intelligence, negotiations, serious games
1. Why of INTEREST
In order to solve global problems -e.g. climate change or pandemics - global collaboration is essential. We developed and tested serious games in which we train international negotiation skills and create awareness of differences between "zero sum or win/lose" negotiations and a sustainable "win-win" approach.
2. Introduction
Negotiation is one of the key elements of business collaboration. In a negotiation, two or more parties try to influence each other to achieve their own and common goals (Agndal, Åge & Eklinder-Frick, 2017). In addition to personality, cultural contexts influence negotiation outcomes (Angdal et al., 2017). We investigate whether negotiators' positive self-judgment of the negotiator, the negotiation process, and the relationship can predict negotiation performance. We also examined whether the impact of the personality traits on negotiation performance varies in different cultures. According to Lewicki, 2014, the effects of these aspects on negotiation performance are still unclear. Elfenbein, Eisenkraft, Curhan et al., 2018, conclude that the research concerning negotiation, and the effect of...