Miscommunication during international negotiations: how much do cross-cultural differences and foreign language knowledge matter?

Recent years have seen a vast body of research into how the differences in national culture-dependent values and behaviours affect the process and outcome of international negotiations. The authors in general stress the importance of awareness of cross-cultural differences and the role of training. At the same time, some investigations carried out in Hungary indicate that business professionals working in a multicultural context tend to attribute miscommunication with their foreign partners to their insufficient foreign language skills rather than to their insufficient intercultural competencies. This is believed to be due to the little attention paid to cross-cultural differences both in formal instruction and in in-company trainings. The purpose of the present paper is to present and discuss the results of 96 interviews carried out with Hungarian business practitioners who routinely conduct negotiations with foreign counterparts, and to draw conclusions about their cross-cultural awareness through the analysis of the critical interactional incidents they recalled and how they interpreted them. The findings of the investigation show that less than one fourth of the respondents realise that cross-cultural differences need to be taken into account when preparing for and conducting negotiations, whereas the majority believe that their success in international negotiations is a result of factors other than their foreign language knowledge or intercultural competence.