The future of buyer-seller interactions: a conceptual framework and research agenda

The revolution in information availability and the advances in novel interaction technologies have ushered in two major shifts that call into question the traditional assumptions of buyer-seller interactions. First, buyer-seller information asymmetry has greatly decreased in many interactions. Second, face-to-face communication is no longer the main format of buyer-seller interactions. In this article, the authors review empirical research on how these shifts have changed buyer-seller negotiations, an important type of buyer-seller interactions. Several insights arise from this review. First, the shifts have caused fundamental changes in buyers' and sellers' roles, power, and aspirations and information processing. Second, the shifts and these fundamental changes together cause major changes in buyer-seller interactional processes and outcomes, including (1) change in buyers' attitude and behavior, (2) change in sellers' effectiveness in interacting with buyers, and (3) change in buyer-seller interactional processes. Based on these insights, the authors develop a research agenda to guide the reexamination of existing theories and the development of new theories of buyer-seller interactions.

The science of culture and negotiation

Recent negotiation research has produced a groundswell of insights about the effects of culture on negotiation. Yet, few frameworks exist to organize the findings. This review integrates recent research using a two-dimensional framework: The first dimension organizes the research into that which has taken: (1) a comparative intracultural approach, versus (2) an intercultural approach. The second dimension organizes the research by its emphasis on: (1) inputs into negotiation, (2) processes of negotiating, and (3) outcomes of negotiation. This framework helps to organize extant research and produces novel insights about the connections between disparate research streams, revealing both commonalities and culture-specificities in negotiation strategy and outcomes and suggesting that intercultural negotiations are difficult but not insurmountable. We conclude by discussing several areas in which more research on culture and negotiation is urgently needed in today's globalizing world.

Culture's Consequences for Leadership: The Role of Context in Affecting Leadership Perceptions and Performance

As acknowledged by Lord and Dinh (2014) in their focal article, across a plethora of organizational literatures and topics of interest, there often seems to be a common theme: context matters. Although this is not a very surprising statement and may seem obvious, the surprising reality is that within a number of topics in our field, context is either superficially taken into consideration or not examined at all. This oversight has the potential to skew our understanding of important concepts. Indeed, Joshi and Roh (2009) revealed in their meta-analysis exploring team diversity that context served as a significant moderator of performance, illustrating the criticality of understanding how contextual factors may predict outcomes above and beyond individual inputs.