Face Negotiation Theory

This part of the paper deals with the results of the empirical testing of face-negotiation theory. The impact of cultural, individual and situational factors on face and facework is discussed in terms of previous research.

It should not be surprising that culture, defined by Herskovits (1955) and Triandis (1972) as the human-made part of the environment, which consists of “objective and subjective elements that … became shared among those who could communicate with each other because they had a common language and lived in the same time and place” Triandis (1972, p. 3) significantly influences every aspect of our life, in particular, face concern and facework. In general, both early and further testing of the face-negotiation theory showed

They should be mentioned here because on the basis of conflict literature a model and instrument were developed by Oetzel and colleagues (2000, 2001), which can be considered the first attempt to create comprehensive list of facework strategies and provide a way to measure it (detailed description of the instrument is provided in the Methods section). Among other things, it was found that collectivists tend to use integrating, compromising and avoiding conflict styles (Trubisky & Ting-Toomey, 1991; Holt & DeVore, 2005) and obliging conflict style (Trubisky & Ting-Toomey, 1991) more than individualists. In the study of Croucher and colleagues (2012) the dimension of context was taken as an independent variable. It was found that people from high-context cultures (they are normally collectivistic) preferred compromising more than low-context (individualistic) nations. The rest of their findings indicated that whereas high-context countries preferred avoiding and obliging, low-context nations were more likely to use dominating strategy (Croucher et al.,

Besides, individualism was negatively connected to other face-concern (Oetzel et al., 2001). High and low power distance positively predicted the use of dominating and avoiding styles, while individualism was positively related to dominating but negatively related to avoiding (Oetzel et al., 2001; Oetzel & Ting-Toomey, 2003). Other paper by Oetzel and colleagues provided evidence of causal links between other-face concern and avoiding facework strategy, as well as partial support for prediction of dominating facework strategy by self-face concern and integrating facework strategy by mutual-face (Oetzel, Garcia & Ting-Toomey,