Hungarian societal values through business negotiators’ practices

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on Hungarian societal values, namely the debate on whether Hungary is a masculine or a feminine culture. First, it introduces dimension-based cross-cultural research and then it reviews the controversial results of large- and smaller-scale investigations concerning masculinity and femininity in the Hungarian culture and, relating to these cultural values, it outlines the concept of distributive and integrative negotiations. Next, the findings of a questionnaire survey with a sample of 241 Hungarian respondents from the Northern Transdanubian region, who routinely take part in business negotiations, are presented, discussed and related to previous results. The findings appear to confirm that the masculine approach is preferred and also that employees of smaller companies tend to be more feminine than those working for large organisations. At the same time, they also show that the level of masculinity is not as high as some previous pieces of research suggest and further, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the values of the younger and older generation or male and female negotiators. The paper concludes that although there may be a slight preference for assertive qualities, Hungarian business negotiators appear to try to balance competition and cooperation and aim for a win-win outcome.