International business negotiations after the pandemic

Abstract

As the world has globalised over the century, conducting international business has become a must for countries. When doing business, overseas skilled negotiation is needed. Negotiation is, of course, necessary for all areas of life and not limited just to international business but international negotiations have additional complexity. The traditional approach to international business negotiations has been to travel to the other party’s country and to negotiate face to face. When COVID-19 occurred the ability to travel overseas was limited and people turned to online platforms. Almost overnight negotiations were taking place through video and online platforms. With this uptake of online negotiation, there is a need to understand how organisations adapted and remained competitive and to understand how going forward, now the pandemic, and the response to the pandemic, has changed, organisations will continue to operate (face-to-face versus online). To what extent might online negotiations continue in part or in full and will this differ across industries in future?

The aim of this thesis is to explore how organisations across a range of countries and industries have continued to operate throughout the pandemic to remain competitive and how they intend to operate going forward in the post-pandemic world. The framework for negotiating face-to-face introduced by Ghauri was used as the basis of this thesis. The framework was broken down into three parts, pre-negotiation, negotiation, and post negotiation. Alongside other literature the framework was used as a base for the primary research conducted in this thesis. The results of this thesis suggest that most industries will adopt a hybrid negotiation approach. An approach which is partially conducted online and partially face-to-face. It seems that organisations will subjectively decide which elements of the process (pre-negotiation, negotiation, and post negotiation) to conduct online and which elements face-to-face. Depending on the goals of the negotiations, such as a long-term relationship with the opposing party, or a onetime hard deal to get the best result possible, there are subjective benefits to which parts are conducted face-to-face versus online.

This research has important implications for negotiators to understand the benefits of hybrid negotiations across industries. It provides evidence of how organisations are looking to continue to operate going forward and how they managed to remain competitive when the normal business travel was not possible.