Page 266 - DMGT519_Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Notes the bigger and more profitable businesses”. Apparently, when everybody else is unethical and
the expectation is that business will be unethical, being ethical pays – even if it only serves
blatant self-interest.

12.13 Implications for Managers

Managers do not share the same ethical code and understanding of social responsibility. They
also cannot assume that their own corporation’s ethical conduct is superior. As a result,
international managers need to develop a framework for evaluating ethical codes and
determining their own ethics.
International managers must understand other societies, religion, values, culture, law, and
ethics. What may be a shocking breach of ethics to a Western businessperson – child labour, a
wage of pennies a day, or blatant gender discrimination – may be acceptable behaviour in
another culture. Knowing the behaviours and ethics of other cultures can help determine whether
a course of action is appropriate or not.
Most scholars of international business ethics view the identification and resolution of ethical
issues as difficult and complex. Because many ethical issues are emerging as new technologies
develop, as new forms of organizational interdependence evolve, and as cultures come into
contact. Thus, it is likely that precisely what ethical and legal behaviour is, will change in the
future. This implies that managers should keep informed concerning new developments in
cross-cultural ethics and not assume that ethics are well-defined and agreed upon, and therefore,
non-problematic.
12.14 Ethics in Negotiations

Negotiators face an acute dilemma at some stage during the negotiation – for instance, situations
where they do not know what would be the right thing to do, and where they know what is
right, but fail to do it, because of competitive or organizational pressures.
While ‘creating value’ is at the centre of principled negotiations, no negotiator can forget that he
has to ‘claim value’ for himself and his organization. In ‘claiming value’ the negotiator is
jockeying for a better position in relation to the other party. There is a tension between these
two value-seeking behaviours that is at the centre of the ethical problem.
As Andrew Stark in his HBR article says: “The fact is, most people’s motives are a confusing mix
of self-interest, altruism, and other influences.” According to him, instead of grappling with this
complexity, many times we get diverted into thinking that our actions “cannot be ethical unless
(they) in no way serve” our self-interest. There seems to be a view that genuinely ethical action
must hurt the actor. In this “messy world of mixed motives”, we must identify a set of workable
virtues for negotiators. One of these is toughness. “Neither callously self-interested nor purely
altruistic, virtuous toughness involves both a ‘willingness to do what is necessary’, and ‘an
insistence on doing it as humanely as possible’.” The article mentions other such morally complex
virtues such as courage, fairness, sensitivity, persistence, honesty, and gracefulness. “Ethical
actions don’t take place in splendid isolation; in practice, for example, ethics seems to rest on
reciprocity”. This principle of ‘mutual trust’ and reciprocity is another useful way to deal with
the ethical dilemma.
Negotiation is about perceived conflict between two or more parties who are committed to a
long-term relationship and are also committed to implement the agreement. So long as these
two commitments exist, negotiators will know the extent to which they can go in ‘claiming

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