Advancing the Scientific Understanding of Trust and Culture in Negotiations

Abstract

Trust plays a crucial role throughout the entire negotiation process, and culture adds more complexity to the meaning, functions, and dynamics of trust in negotiations. We take a modest step to provide some insights on trust and culture in the context of negotiations and envision what opportunities are ahead of us in this area. Specifically, we provide a “cognitive map” based on the collective wisdom in the extant negotiation literature and focus on raising important questions about six key culture‐related issues that warrant future research: (a) the meaning of trust, (b) the effects of trust, (c) trust development, (d) trust and distrust, (e) trust repair, and (f) trust in virtual negotiations.