Leadership Due in 12 hours, APA Style, minimum 1.5 pages
TWU Global LDRS 300: Leadership as service
Unit 9.1
What is Culture?
©brendaleesasaki2021
creating a service culture – where do we begin?
We start by unpacking the idea of culture…What is Culture?
Some definitions of culture
“Culture is a set of shared and enduring meanings, values, and beliefs that characterize national, ethnic, and other groups and orient their behavior”. (Faure and Sjostedt 1993)
“Culture is defined as the socially transmitted behavior patterns, norms, beliefs, and values of a given community.” (Salacuse 1991)
“Culture is the patterns of learned and shared behavior and beliefs of a particular social, ethnic, or age group. It can also be described as the complex whole of collective human beliefs with a structured stage of civilization that can be specific to a nation or time period. Humans in turn use culture to adapt and transform the world they live in.” (Lumen, Cultural Anthropology)
Let’s examine Three ways to understand culture
“The critic Raymond Williams, in his dictionary, “Keywords,” writes that “culture” has three divergent meanings.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/meaning-culture
#1 Individual enrichment
There’s culture as a process of individual enrichment, as when we say that someone is “cultured” (in 1605, Francis Bacon wrote about “the culture and manurance (training) of minds”).
When we desire to grow as persons through engaging in diverse reading, art, music, events to expand our thinking and perceptions of ourselves and the world.
#2 a group’s way of life
Culture as a group’s “particular way of life,” as when we talk about French culture, Chinese culture, company culture, or multiculturalism.
Families have particular cultures as do communities, religious groups, businesses, organizations, etc…
#3 Culture as activity
Culture as an activity, pursued by means of the museums, concerts, books, and movies that might be encouraged by a country’s Ministry of Culture.
Becoming more knowledgeable about cultural ideas and practices and their connection to people, places and particular histories by interacting with artifacts and events.
Let’s look at two culture models
Photo by Brian McMahon on Unsplash
9
Model #1: Hofstede’s onion model of culture
Professor Geert Hofstede, Dutch researcher, analyst, leadership and culture expert spent a great deal of time studying and writing on the intersection of culture and leadership. He studied people who worked for IBM, a computer company for over 50 years and in offices across the globe.
He identified 6 layers to understanding a culture that is helpful for us as leaders who want to manage cross-cultural relationships and conflict well.
Diagram retrieved from https://www.iam-afghanistan.org/lcp/2016/01/30/levels-of-culture/
Values, Rituals, Heroes, Symbols
Values are described as the ‘core of culture’ which as ‘ broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others are acquired early in our lives.
Rituals are considered being ‘ collective activities, technically superfluous to reaching desired ends, but which within a culture are considered as socially essential ’.
Heroes and Symbols mostly have a far shorter life-cycle (an exception seem being ‘religious heroes’ and related symbols).
Heroes are defined as ‘ persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and serve as models for behaviour.
Symbols are words, gestures or objects which carry a particular meaning only recognized as such by those who share a culture.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-onion-model-of-culture-Hofstede-Hofstede-2005_fig1_230580214
Model #2 The iceberg model
The iceberg model of culture developed by American anthropologist Edward T. Hall breaks down culture into three categories, each one diving deeper into the cultural “iceberg.” A combination of these three types of characteristics make up every culture around the world.
1. Surface Culture – easily observable characteristics of a culture (language, currency, art, cooking, music, holidays, fashion, literature, sports, religion).
2. Deep Culture - unspoken rules hidden beneath these observable artifacts (business etiquette, social norms, modesty, gender roles, symbolism of colour, objects and individuals).
3. Deeper Culture - unconscious rules that are more difficult to learn and navigate through because they are rooted so deeply in a culture. Even people within the culture do not always see or understand these deeply embedded rules (death, age, gender, emotional responses, class, physical space, sense of time, concepts of right and wrong).
Pause, Reflect & RESPOND
While watching the following video, observe & reflect on what stood out for you and consider the following:
Do you think you understand your culture?
How might you define your culture? How might your definition be different from your parents? Your friends?
Given the different perspectives presented in the video, what might be a good practice when it comes to understanding a person from a different culture?
Photo by Olena Sergienko on Unsplash
What is culture?
Unless otherwise noted material and ideas for this lecture are based on the book, The Service Culture Handbook (2017) by Jeff Toister
Toister, Jeff. (2017). The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service. Toister Performance Solutions.
Unless otherwise noted, all images used in this presentation are royalty free from www.unsplash.com, creative commons or personal photos from ©brendaleesasaki