Abstract
This article discusses the pedagogical value of using remote role plays in cross‐cultural negotiations between two classes taught simultaneously at different and geographically distant institutions. We argue that remote role‐play simulations provide valuable teaching and learning experiences, and are particularly helpful for managing issues associated with outside‐group negotiation and cultural differences, the prenegotiation stage, electronic negotiations and distorted communication, and one‐shot settings in which the negotiator lacks previous knowledge of the partner. The article begins with a discussion of some critical limitations of “traditional” in‐class role plays, followed by a practical guide to remote role plays and a report of our experiences with them. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of remote role plays as a teaching tool for international negotiation classes and the key lessons for the participating students.
Introduction: Why Remote Role Plays?
In his recent article on teaching international business negotiation, Jeswald Salacuse (2010) mentioned two primary teaching methods used by negotiation instructors around the world: didactic and, more importantly, experiential.
The use of experiential methods, particularly role plays, as a pedagogical tool in classroom settings is a widely recognized and generally considered effective way of teaching international negotiation (Weiss 2008; Honeyman, Coben, and De Palo 2009; Salacuse 2010). Not only do role plays illustrate certain negotiation phenomena (although often in a simplified way), they also offer the opportunity for participants to apply methods previously introduced in the course and to develop their skills.
Despite these advantages, the use of role plays in negotiation teaching has several limitations. For example, participants in classroom negotiations usually study at the same university, sometimes in the same program, and are often taking the same course(s) instructed by the same professor(s). This means that, although participants may have diverse educational, cultural, or professional backgrounds, they now belong to a group with shared characteristics. According to Roderick M. Kramer (1991), Wolfgang Stroebe and his colleagues (1988), and Stephen Worchel and William G Austin (1986), in‐group negotiations have distinctly different characteristics than negotiations with outsiders. The feeling of group belonging, the relationships that develop among group members, and the participants’ reputation (Glick and Croson 2001), which either already exist among university classmates or are likely to be established and strengthened through a shared learning experience, are often not present at the outset of business, diplomatic, or political negotiations. These factors might, however, have a considerable impact on negotiating behavior. It is unlikely that role‐play instructions can completely eliminate this impact, even though they often call for students to negotiate as if relations between the parties are completely different from those that actually exist.
Classroom negotiations also differ from those real‐world negotiations with respect to process expectations. Despite individual differences between the students, because they attend the same negotiation course taught by the same instructor they are likely to have similar expectations regarding the process (e.g., use of a new method) and/or desired outcome. More importantly, these expectations are known to all course participants. This is rare outside the classroom: even when the parties have similar process expectations, they may not know that at the outset and those process expectations need to be communicated and managed.
Another consideration in real‐world negotiations is the selection of a communication medium. Although most negotiation courses focus primarily on face‐to‐face negotiations, the already extensive use of electronic communications by individuals and organizations is expected to increase in the future (Harvard Business Review Analytic Services 2009). Moreover, research shows that e‐negotiations can differ significantly from face‐to‐face negotiations (Drolet and Morris 2000; Morris et al. 2002; Galin, Gross, and Gosalker 2007). Therefore, we believe it is essential to prepare students for this challenge.
In “traditional” classroom settings, instructors typically begin negotiation role plays by distributing instructions and assigning counterparts. Whether or not they receive their instructions in advance, students usually do not begin negotiating before the class begins and frequently do not even know who their counterpart will be. When the in‐class negotiation period begins, students generally find their counterpart(s), arrange their seating (or look for a suitable place outside the classroom), and negotiate the exercise face‐to‐face. In such settings, student control over the prenegotiation stage — during which the parties establish initial contact, arrange negotiation settings and schedule meetings, and, in so doing, form first impressions and certain expectations with respect to the upcoming negotiation — does not exist at all, or is reduced to a minimum. As we found in our recent study (Kesting and Smolinski 2011), the prenegotiation stage is important for trust development, and effective prenegotiation efforts can substantially improve the outcome, particularly for remote negotiations. The prenegotiation stage is thus an essential element of the negotiation process and should be included in negotiation teaching.
Finally, in‐class role plays have always been inherently limited in their ability to authentically replicate the international negotiation context, especially for culturally homogeneous student groups. To a limited extent, appropriately formulated role‐play instructions can allow the modeling of typical behavioral patterns of a particular culture, for example, American and Thai cultures in the simulation MedLee: In Pursuit of a Healthy Joint Venture (Lun and Salacuse 2001). Nevertheless, even the best instructions will not enable an American to truly negotiate as a Thai and vice versa. Ideally, therefore, to be exposed to real cultural differences and the real complexities of international negotiation, students should negotiate with counterparts from another culture in another country, using geographically neutral role plays.
In 2007, in an attempt to address the aforementioned challenges and limitations, we introduced technologically mediated international negotiations into our negotiation courses. This article describes our experiences so far and evaluates the pedagogical usefulness of international online negotiations for teaching international negotiation.
The benefits of using role plays in online education have recently been analyzed by David Matz and Noam Ebner (2010). The focus of our article, however, is not on the use of role plays in online negotiation teaching, but on the use of a similar method as a complementary tool to a traditional face‐to‐face classroom experience. Its distinct pedagogical value comes from the incorporation of the prenegotiation phase into the learning/teaching experience, which makes this exercise more similar to real business negotiations. Another difference, introduced with the same objective of bringing classroom experience closer to standard business practice, is that we leave the choice of communication medium to the participating students and let them negotiate without interference from the instructors.
In this article, we describe our experiences using remote role plays to teach international negotiation. We first describe the procedural details and the difficulties that can emerge during the exercise and suggest how to deal with them. Our intention is to provide international negotiation instructors with a practical guide for including cross‐cultural remote role‐play simulations in their courses. We also outline our experiences with variations of remote role plays in cross‐cultural contexts. Finally, we briefly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of remote role plays as a complementary tool to classroom negotiation instruction.
Setting Up and Conducting the Remote Role‐Play Exercise
The exercise described in this article is a role‐play‐based negotiation between negotiation students in two different countries. In our case, we ran the exercise with students located in Germany and the United States, Germany and France, and, most recently, Germany and Denmark and Denmark and Japan. This makes face‐to‐face negotiation almost impossible and forces students to use electronic communication channels. All negotiations were conducted in English.
The students who took part in this exercise had not met their counterparts, and their paths are unlikely to cross in the future. The exercise was the only reason for them to get to know each other, and their interactions were, as far as we know, limited to its duration. We matched negotiation counterparts in the same way as we would form dyads for role‐play simulations in traditional classroom settings, although this exercise usually requires some additional coordination effort (e.g., exchanging lists of course participants and their contact details, informing them about the setup, etc.). Having experimented with various setups, we find that this exercise works well when both classes have a similar number of students. To avoid undesired information flows, we assign all students in a particular location to the same role, and ask them not to reveal any details of their ongoing negotiation or its outcomes to their classmates.
Based on our experience and student feedback, we think it is generally better for participants to negotiate in small teams rather than individually. This helps them overcome initial reservations about contacting and interacting with foreign students they do not know, better comprehend relatively complex instructions, and motivate each other, which gives the negotiation a certain momentum. But because having too many team members can create scheduling and coordination difficulties, the teams should be small. We think that dyads consisting of two students on each side work best for this purpose. To cope with potential differences in class size between the two locations, we sometimes formed teams of three.
Before the exercise, both instructors briefly introduce the role play and explain its setup and timing. Clarity about logistics at this point can save the instructor a lot of time later. The exercise begins when the students receive their instructions and the names and contact details of their negotiation counterparts.
Thereafter, the students are expected to continue on their own, including selecting the communication medium. In the past, the students have used e‐mail, online “chat,” voice (telephone or Skype), video conferencing, or different combinations of these. Before starting the negotiation, however, students must first contact each other via e‐mail, agree on a communication channel, and possibly arrange “virtual meetings” (e.g., through conference calls, online chat meetings, or other real‐time communication events). For many students, the prenegotiation stage proves to be more difficult than the subsequent negotiations. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong, but part of the learning experience. Therefore, instructors should expect a number of questions in the first week of the exercise. We usually try to be supportive and keep the momentum going, but at the same time not to interfere too much so that the students can experience the difficulties of the prenegotiation stage. We usually give the students two to three weeks to complete their negotiations, although this depends on the particular negotiation role play chosen. Experience shows that it takes one to two weeks for students to get through the prenegotiation stage and start negotiating the substance of the exercise. Scheduling should also take account of such factors as examinations, holidays, and school vacations.
Many role plays are suitable for this exercise. Because the students are asked to prepare and negotiate in teams of two, and are given a generous time frame, we usually use a somewhat complex role play. Although we have not used multi‐party cases, which would require working with classes in three or more locations, even this would be possible although considerably more complex to manage. In the past, we have used a purely distributive role play and also a multi‐issue integrative role play called HotDeal. We have had very good experiences with the latter.
HotDeal is an integrative, two‐party, two‐issue negotiation role play, simulating the potential acquisition of a medium‐sized, family‐owned production company (TechnicTrix) by a private equity financial investor (HotDeal).1 The two negotiation issues are the acquisition price and the number of post‐acquisition layoffs. The main challenge of this role play is to determine the differences in relative importance of these issues for the parties concerned (see Raiffa 1982, for the structure of multi‐issue negotiations). For TechnicTrix, the price is (relatively) more important than layoffs, whereas for HotDeal, the number of layoffs is more important. Because the differences in relative importance of the issues to the other party cannot be determined from a particular party's confidential instructions, achieving an efficient solution requires an exchange of information and mutual exploration of interests. Result efficiency might also be improved through the post‐settlement settlements (see Raiffa 1985). Because of the focus on “acquisition price” and “layoffs” and the simple structure of these issues, it is possible to create value for both parties by making appropriate choices within these issues, without inventing completely new options (Fisher and Ury 1981). The results of the case are perfectly scoreable and therefore comparable as long as the issues remain restricted to the sale price and the number of layoffs.
At the end of the exercise, the students report their results to the instructors by e‐mail. Particularly for negotiations taking place across time zones, the submission deadline should be well‐defined. We have kept the form of the report informal, simply asking students to send us the results of their negotiations but an instructor could also standardize a final report by drafting and distributing an appropriate form.
From a pedagogical point of view, the most important part of this exercise is the debriefing. It is particularly important to address the difficulties students might have had with their negotiation counterparts and link them to what can happen in real‐life negotiations. In the debriefing, we emphasize that exposing students to these difficulties is precisely the point of the role play. We also usually discuss what happens during the prenegotiation phase (including selection of the communication medium and scheduling meetings), the advantages and limitations of their chosen media, differences in negotiating style and ways to react to behavior they find offensive or difficult, and the relevance of long‐term relationships and reputations. In our experience, it is best to keep the debriefing rather free flowing, in the form of a classroom discussion without slides.
In our courses, we asked the students to write and submit a graded journal in which they reflected on their experiences during the negotiations in the context of the material already discussed in class. We decided to use journals for three reasons. First, we hoped that keeping the journal would increase students’ engagement with the negotiation process, giving the negotiations a certain momentum. Second, we hoped that reflecting on the process would improve students’ understanding of what happened. Finally, the journals gave us important insights into the parallel negotiation processes, which were useful for our continuing refinement of the simulation.
Outcomes and Experiences with Remote Role Plays
We have based our discussion of our experiences with remote role plays on insights gained from in‐class discussions, e‐mail communication with the students during the negotiations, students’ direct feedback, their journal entries concerning this exercise, and a questionnaire that students answered after the negotiations were completed.
International Negotiations
Although graduate business programs already typically comprise students from many nations, using remote negotiation role plays in teaching international negotiation enriches the multicultural aspects of the learning experience even further. First, the participants in remote role plays are physically located in different countries, which increases their perception of real cross‐cultural differences in a way similar to that in real business negotiations. This effect is difficult to reproduce in classroom settings because even culturally diversified classes often share many characteristics and expectations. Second, because the participants do not know their negotiation counterparts before the exercise, they can only guess which culture they are from based on their names. Unless this uncertainty is addressed and overcome during the prenegotiation phase, it might lead to stereotyping, misunderstandings, and suboptimal negotiation outcomes.
Because the cross‐cultural aspects are inherent to the structure of the simulation, we decided to use geographically neutral role plays with a focus on modeling the differences in interests and including disguised value‐creation possibilities. This allowed us to let the students deal with the cross‐cultural aspects of negotiation in the interpersonal sphere rather than forcing them to attempt to display characteristics of cultures other than their own.
The First Contact
The prenegotiation phase is typically characterized by students’ difficulties in contacting their counterparts and arranging the details of the upcoming negotiations. Although in some cases the reasons are rather trivial, such as misspelled e‐mail addresses, connectivity problems, or unplanned absences, often these difficulties are caused by the students’ procrastination and carelessness. In addition, many students feel uncomfortable initiating contact with people they do not know, particularly when those people are in a different country and speak a foreign language (all negotiations were conducted in English); thus, they often passively wait for their counterparts to make the first move.
Despite these difficulties, prenegotiation — especially establishing the first contact — is an important element of the experience. Unlike traditional role plays, in which the initial phase is typically determined by the class setting, our exercise requires students to be active before the official negotiations begin. As the results of our questionnaire have shown, this first contact affects the entire negotiation in that it shapes the parties’ first impression of each other and fosters trust or distrust. The importance of the prenegotiation phase is a key insight of the exercise and should be addressed in the debriefing.
The Choice of Communication Channel
The students’ next task during the prenegotiation stage is to agree on a communication channel and (in the case of synchronous communication modes) schedule virtual negotiations. The students could use any communication channel they considered suitable for their needs. We did not introduce any rules or restrictions with respect to the selection and usage of different channels. Table One illustrates the media mix for the negotiations between students in Denmark and Germany in 2010 and 2011. In the table, “voice” stands for both Skype (without video and chat function) and telephone; “chat” stands for online, text‐based, real‐time chat such as MSN chat, Skype chat (without voice and video function), or Facebook chat; and “video” stands for Skype with video (but without the chat function). Our students have not yet used other media than those mentioned in the table. The percentages of the different media represent the frequency with which each channel was mentioned in students’ surveys, students were free to use more than one medium.
. | E‐Mail Only . | Voice . | Chat . | Video . |
---|---|---|---|---|
2010 | 47% | 27% | 13% | 13% |
2011 | 42% | 27% | 11% | 18% |
. | E‐Mail Only . | Voice . | Chat . | Video . |
---|---|---|---|---|
2010 | 47% | 27% | 13% | 13% |
2011 | 42% | 27% | 11% | 18% |
This mix seems to be somewhat typical for the negotiations that we have observed. E‐mail is the entry point for the negotiations (as both negotiating parties only receive the e‐mail addresses of their counterparts) and many students stay with that throughout the negotiations. Some students, however, consider e‐mail communication too restrictive and switch to other communication media. When changing to other communication media, a relatively large number of the students turn to “traditional” voice and fewer to chat and video. Most students reported that their choice was driven by considerations of effort, costs, and effectiveness. One student, however, also reported that her team deliberately chose e‐mail communication in order to experience the difficulties of restricted communication.
Research has already established that the choice of communication channel affects both the negotiation process and the outcome (Morris et al. 2002; Galin et al. 2007). This was confirmed by students’ answers to our questionnaires. We also found that the difficulty of agreeing on a communication channel with the other party had a significant impact on the (perceived) communication restrictions and the subsequent outcome. This again highlights the importance of the prenegotiation phase and of the pedagogic value of remote negotiations. These insights also apply to offline negotiations, as negotiators outside the classroom frequently engage in prenegotiation regarding issues such as scheduling, location, and time frame. These issues should be addressed in the debriefing of the role play as well.
Communication Difficulties
Unsurprisingly, communication restrictions were the most frequently mentioned challenge in the students’ journals. As one student summed up, “Not being able to look the other party in the eye and thus not being able to observe their body language and facial expressions during the negotiation was a problem for us.”2
In the specific case of e‐mail negotiations, students also mentioned the missing intonation of language, and — most of all — a missing “flow of communication.” The reported effects of the communication restrictions generally fell in the following categories.
Difficulties in Understanding the Other Party(ies)
First and foremost, students mentioned an increased number of substantive misunderstandings, resulting in the need to spend more effort on clarification. Second, most students had “difficulties in reading feelings” in the remote setting. One student reported that “Face‐to‐face negotiations would have been better, because then we would have been able to hear the other party's voice, which might have made it easier to hear or see if something was wrong.” But another student pointed out the potential of emoticons for expressing emotions. Third, students had “difficulties determining whether the partner was telling the truth” or, as another student put it, “Are they telling the truth, part of the truth, or just lies? This was the hardest thing to detect.”
Difficulties Building a Personal Relationship
One student reported, “We tried to ask some ‘ice‐breaker questions’ in order to make the setting as casual as possible, but this falls relatively short in cases where you cannot see your counterparts and their smiles, nods, or other communication patterns. Therefore, we were not able to create a basic relationship to each other.” Another student even admitted, “We did nothing on relationship. This was difficult by e‐mail.”
Some students reported difficulties establishing trust — not only trusting the other party, but also convincing the other party of their own trustworthiness. One wrote, “It was hard to come to an agreement, because we failed to build trust between us.”
Not all teams were unable to build trust and some were able to establish a positive relationship with their counterparts. We will address this point in more detail further.
Specific Difficulties with Pure E‐mail Communication
First of all, some students found it not only time‐consuming to write e‐mails, but also difficult because, as one student wrote, “you have to be very precise and consider your words carefully to make sure that the other party understands correctly.”
Most of all, however, students felt restricted by the interrupted communication flow. They found it rather “difficult to pick up reactions when they are delayed.” In contrast, students had surprisingly few problems communicating via internet chat (MSN, Skype, and Facebook), although one student expressed a preference for remote negotiation, because she “can't bear to see too much negative expression from others.” She reported that it was more “difficult to deal with the partner” in her own team than with those from the other school.
All in all, these comments correlate with the research findings on communication and electronic negotiations (Drolet and Morris 2000; Morris et al. 2002; Thompson and Nadler 2002; Holtom and Kenworthy‐U'Ren 2006; Galin et al. 2007) that suggest that remote negotiations involve more task‐focused communication, less relationship building, less rapport, fewer positive emotions, and less trust development than are found in face‐to‐face negotiations. Through first‐hand exposure to e‐negotiations, the students gained valuable insights about the process of electronic negotiation that they would not have been able to acquire through in‐class exercises. One might object that modern teleconferencing systems have become increasingly sophisticated and offer communication channels that are superior to those used in our exercise. While this may be true, the students’ use of relatively “lean” communication media, we argue, increases their understanding of communication restrictions and how those restrictions can affect negotiations.
Unfriendliness in Remote Negotiations
The most discussed topic in the student feedback sessions was the perceived rude tone of negotiations. A considerable proportion of the students described their negotiation counterparts as direct, impersonal, or even offensive and unfair. Unsurprisingly, most of their counterparts had a similar impression. One student summarized the problem this way:
It is difficult for me to see how we could have done any better in the negotiations because they started so high that it would have been very difficult for us to get a reasonable price. I did not feel that they wanted to play fair or work on a long‐term relationship. So if it had been in real life, it would probably have been a lose–lose situation, because I would not have agreed on this deal.
Another student reported:
Throughout the whole negotiation we tried to be fair and support all our offers with arguments and reasons, but TechnicTrix [one of the parties in the role play] did not accept or listen to our arguments. Even though we tried the opposite, the negotiations unfortunately became personal and unethical. This could be one of the main reasons why we didn't reach an agreement before the deadline.
One student noted about her counterpart, “It was also hard just to take all his outbursts, and his accusations of us being unfair and trying to stay calm ourselves.”
These reports are in accordance with the questionnaires, which show that some students described their remote counterparts’ negotiation styles as being much more positional and harder than their face‐to‐face counterparts in other negotiations. Not all students had the same experience, however, and some teams managed to create a positive atmosphere throughout their negotiations.
It seems that these unfriendly negotiations are a product of both the out‐of‐group constellation and the communication deficits. One student summed it up this way: “It is very tough negotiating with people you don't know and cannot see.”
Ultimately, unfriendly negotiations can be a consequence of the inability to build a positive relationship and establish trust and mutual fairness between the parties. To date, little research has examined what drives this phenomenon in technologically mediated remote negotiations. Ingmar Geiger and Jennifer Parlamis (2011) have proposed the construct of “e‐mail affinity,” which they argue comprises three characteristics — e‐mail preference, e‐mail comfort, and e‐mail clarity. In our remote role plays we could particularly observe the significance of the prenegotiation phase in this regard. First of all, our questionnaires indicate that the communication in the negotiations was driven by the difficulties that parties had reaching each other (and the resulting first impression of their counterparts). Even more important, however, seemed to be the choice of the communication channel. The use of video and, surprisingly, online chat both seemed to correlate with stronger relationships between the parties. In contrast, pure e‐mail communication appears to be less suitable for relationship building. Moreover, we also observed a relationship between the difficulties that parties had agreeing on a communication channel in the prenegotiation phase and the relational outcome of the negotiations. (The correlation between perceived difficulties in the prenegotiation phase and the relational outcome was statistically significant with a correlation coefficient −0.411, at the 0.001 level). This observation is in line with the findings of Geiger and Parlamis (2011) suggesting that individuals have different affinities and preferences for specific communication channels (not only e‐mail) and that this affinity might have an important impact on the negotiation process and its outcome.
We think that these difficulties creating relationships are an important aspect of remote role plays, which, for the reasons discussed in the introduction, cannot easily be replaced or simulated by traditional in‐class role plays. This experience clearly shows the students that they cannot always assume that the negotiators they will deal with in the future will be as collegial as their classmates. In order to avoid frustration and neutralize the emotions connected with experiencing unfriendly interactions, the instructors urgently need to discuss them in the debriefing and explain that dealing with such interactions in such a setting is one of the key lessons of the exercise.
Conclusions: Suitability of Remote Role Plays in Teaching International Negotiation
In summary, we think that remote role plays can be a valuable tool for courses on international negotiation because they enable students to experience aspects of cross‐cultural negotiations that are impossible, or at least difficult, to experience in traditional face‐to‐face role plays. These include genuine intercultural experiences stemming from negotiations with people in other countries, the challenges of managing the prenegotiation “set up” phase, and the restrictions of technologically mediated communication. Remote negotiations can therefore be used to broaden the spectrum of relevant topics taught in negotiation classes. Moreover, remote negotiations are a good networking tool for the instructors, as they can be used to build a relationship with a partner institution.
Conducting remote role plays also involves some challenges. First, remote negotiations require more effort for the teacher than traditional face‐to‐face negotiations, particularly because of the additional coordination and supervision required.
Second, remote negotiations are probably not the most effective tool for building positive relationships between students, and should thus be used in settings in which the future relationships between them are unlikely. As suggested by one of our reviewers, joint debriefings including both instructors and both student groups could be an effective way to address this issue. Although we have not tried it yet, we agree that obtaining direct feedback from counterparts might indeed generate improved learning effects.
Third, during the remote role plays, students’ learning experiences are likely to be more negative than in face‐to‐face role plays. We therefore highly recommended that extensive debriefings address these potential negative experiences and integrate them into to a broader learning context. Our experience shows, however, that the students generally appreciate their remote negotiations and that they especially value the realism and difficult lessons of the exercise.
We think that the key lesson from this exercise is the importance of the prenegotiation phase. Students need to be aware of the significance of the first impression and that it is largely shaped during their first interactions with their counterparts. Taking initiative and actively contacting the counterparts is typically positively perceived by the students. If the first contact is initiated by the counterparts, it is advisable to respond quickly in a collegial and professional manner. Before jumping into the negotiation, it might make sense to first engage in “schmoozing” (Moore et al. 1999; Morris et al. 2002) or a casual non‐task‐related conversation, introduce the people involved, exchange personal background information, and search for similarities.
Furthermore, students should be careful with the selection of the communication channel. They need to be aware that it is typically challenging to establish a positive relationship through e‐mail negotiations and that there are potentially better alternatives, in particular online chat, which does not require much additional effort and seems to lead to quite positive results. Moreover, they should be also aware of their individual media affinities and preferences and respect those of their counterparts.
Finally, we do not recommend using remote role plays exclusively to teach international negotiation because many aspects of negotiations can only be addressed through face‐to‐face exercises. Therefore, we highly recommend using remote negotiations as a valuable addition to, but not as a replacement for, face‐to‐face negotiations.
NOTES
This role play will be available at European Case Clearing House soon.
All quotations are taken from students’ journals and from the questionnaires; to improve readability we corrected mistakes in spelling and grammar.