Hakan Ozcelik, Business Administration.
Using Videoconferencing to Develop Emotional Awareness in Cross-Cultural Communication

The ability to effectively communicate with people from other cultures is becoming an increasingly important skill in business organizations. This skill is especially important in negotiations, where outcomes strongly depend on the parties’ capacity to read each other’s emotions. This study aims to design an easy-to-implement module to improve students' emotion management skills in cross-cultural negotiations by using videoconferencing technology. To this end, I have collaborated with Prof. Zita Zoltayne-Paprika from Corvinus University in Hungary.

The study includes the following steps: a) teams of volunteer students were created in each university to gather information about the other country’s culture, b) these teams negotiated a business case in videoconferencing sessions, which were video-recorded by using the Camtasia software, c) these sessions were analyzed and discussed by students in a business communications course, d) the students provided their reflections, which have been currently analyzed to assess the effectiveness of the method.

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