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Ethical dilemmas are inescapable components of business negotiations. The dynamic and often undefined structure of business negotiations leads to a great deal of ambiguity concerning what is morally acceptable and what is not (Adler, 2007; Kronzon and Darley, 1999; Rivers and Lytle, 2007). It is even more challenging to deal with ethical concerns in an international context where negotiators are often from different cultural backgrounds with different values and norms. Obtaining a good understanding of and further effectively managing cross-cultural differences in ethical negotiation strategies has thus become one of the key challenges for multinationals in the global market (Ma, 2010; Volkema and Fleury, 2002).
Business ethics research has shown great interests in how culture might affect individual ethical attitudes in China (von Weltzien Hoivik, 2007), one of the most important emerging markets and probably the next economic superpower. However, few of the business ethics studies have dealt with this issue within mainland China (Lam and Shi, 2008), and even fewer have explored Chinese ethical issues in a business negotiation context (Ma, 2010), where ethical concerns most often arise. While there is a good chance that negotiators will come across a large number of ethical dilemmas in negotiations, surprisingly limited research has been done on negotiation ethics in China. Research on cross-cultural business ethics thus remains inadequate and our knowledge about how the Chinese evaluate the ethicality of certain negotiation tactics is lacking (Rivers, 2009).
To help bridge this knowledge gap, the current study is intended to explore cross-cultural differences in ethical behaviors between Canada, China and Taiwan within a business negotiation context, using the SINS scale (S elf-reported I nappropriate N egotiation S trategies), a scale designed to assess the appropriateness of ethically questionable strategies often used in business negotiations (Robinson et al. , 2000). These three cultures are chosen because Chinese culture is a good representative of Confucian cultures, Canadian culture is a typical Western culture and Taiwanese culture is a mix between traditional Chinese culture and Western cultures due to its deep root in traditional Chinese culture on the one hand and its longer exposure to Western cultures and closer economic and political relationships with the West on the other. A comparison of the perceived ethicality of negotiation strategies between...