CROSS-CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN BUSINESS NEGOTIATION BEHAVIORS BETWEEN FINLAND AND CHINA

Abstract

The business cooperation between Finnish and Chinese companies becomes more and more common nowadays, and many Finnish companies have a big interest in doing business or cooperating with Chinese companies. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the cross-cultural interactions in business negotiation behaviors between Finland and China. The study is about how different national cultural types of Finland and China, such as individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, neutral or affective and low or high context characters, and value of time, influence all negotiation stages, which are pre-negotiation stage, face-to-face negotiation stage and post-negotiation stage. Several propositions are concluded from the theory about the expected results on each stages caused by Finnish and Chinese different cultural types. Qualitative and deductive research methods were used. Interviews were done by relative persons from four Finnish companies that have business operations in China to test the propositions. Contents include pre-negotiation duration, goal setting, team organization, bureaucracy and government involvement, social activities at non-task sounding phase, address, eye contact, personal distance, silence moment, communication style, punctuality performance, agenda-following situation, factors influence decision, individual or collective decision making, specificity of contracts and the implementation situation. Implications and suggestions are given to Finnish companies that want to negotiation with Chinese on the basis of the research result and experience learning.