Question

In reality decision making is difficult and even more challenging in intercultural organizations where team decision making and negotiation is frequently required. In our last discussion we want to explore decision making and negotiation in an intercultural organization. Think back to a recent decision you had to make as a part of a group and reflect on these 3 questions: 1. Determine what decision-making method was used (brainstorming, dialetic inquiry, nominal group technique, Delphi technique, etc) and explain whether it how it was (or was not) successful. 2. Group decisions often require negotiations; what were the differing negotiation expectations among the team members as a result of their cultural differences?

Answer 1

In Intercultural organization, decision making could be difficult task, here; we may require decision making and negotiation much frequently, let me consider a situation where I need to apply decision making method, I worked in manufacturing organization, worked for taking various procurement decisions, here, I have considered individual brainstorming as decision making method, with such method, I have done brainstorming for long time, generated lot of ideas on how to align the procurement steps and resources to the particular products, I have also considered ideas, concepts from other team members, then, I have created aggregated view on that problem. This decision making was somehow successful, as each individual has done lot more searching on the internet platform; they have built their own thought about the process design, further, we have validated entire idea with doing several evaluation process. These ways such decision making method was so successful.

Here, organizations have lot more diversity and inter cultural team members, they have participated in the decision making process as needed for procurement function, here, we could find several negotiation expectation, these are like as stated below:

• Some team members tried to apply their competitive negotiation style as they want to consider least cost and very good quality for driving procurement decisions, hence, they always try to build competition in every decision making process.
• Some other team members consider collaboration and they want to build contract with suppliers and build partnership with them and that could serve organization long term basis, hence, they want collaboration negotiation style.
• Few team members want to apply compromising negotiation style, as they think that considering perfection in all work is not achievable and that could make the tasks difficult, so, project will not be finished within time, hence, they could start compromising on various decision making process.