Establishing common ground through trust-building in negotiations – A linguistic analysis of intercultural interactions in banking services
Trust is vitally important in both personal and business relationships. There should be trust in order to achieve successful cooperation between partners. However, the phenomenon of trust-building across cultures is considered to be a major challenge when a high level of collaboration is to be reached.
Research in intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communication has a number of crucial areas to be explored. The study focuses on strategies for building trust and its linguistic forms that determine the major focus of interaction.
A thorough investigation of the relevant theory related to common ground, trust and rapport management (Malinowski 1923, Javorski 2000, Cui 2012) is followed by an empirical research based on interviews, elicited conversations and in some cases observation. The participants of the research are South-Korean and Israeli clients and Hungarian financial managers collaborating at a Hungarian bank service in Budapest, Hungary.
The findings of the research show the various trust-building strategies (empathy, reliability, openness, reviewing, conforming, creativity, constructivism, etc.) and linguistic markers (again, I’m sure, you see, etc.) used by interlocutors to work towards business integrity and reliability.
The study also reveals how participants achieve cooperation despite the frequent presence of pitfalls such as misunderstandings, assumptions and conflicts.
Keywords: common ground, trust, rapport management, linguistic markers
References
Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2004). Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures (pp.11-46). Continuum.
Kaur, J. (2012). Saying it again: Enhancing clarity in English as a lingua franca (ELF) talk through self-repetition. Text and Talk, 32(5), 593-613.