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CHAPTER RESOURCES Reading Content Introduction 8.1 What Is Culture? 8.2 What Does Culture Mean for Business? 8.3 Managing Cultural Differences 8.4 Building Cultural Intelligence Summary and Case ORION: Build your

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APPENDIX

8.3 Managing Cultural Differences

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Identify ways to manage cultural differences in the workplace.

Open interaction can help to bridge cultural differences. Each party often has a different perspective, but they are also each likely to realize something important about the other through their conversation. Building a platform of common understanding improves the quality of future communication and helps bring about a positive resolution to the situation.

Three key steps can help you achieve this kind of mutual understanding and so manage business across cultures. These steps—the three Rs of recognition, respect, and reconciliation (shown in Figure 8.9)—offer a framework to help you not only tolerate differences but also embrace and capitalize on them. In this way you can create greater value than if you hadn't acknowledged the differences. Let's consider each step in turn and learn how to implement them.

FIGURE 8.9 The 3 Rs of managing cultural differences.

Recognize Differences Before doing business with someone from another culture, ask yourself, “What do I know about this person's culture?” Recognizing cultural differences begins with assessing your factual knowledge about the other culture. In Section 8.2, we covered several different cultural dimensions and the ways they influence business. Recognizing what to expect when working with people from different cultures can be the first step in helping you to respond and react correctly. It can help you avoid offending your business partners and understand why a deal you've been trying to structure may be taking so long.

Recognizing differences consists of first selecting which cultural dimension(s) to examine and

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PRACTICE Chapter 8 Reading Quiz

APPENDIX

8.3 Managing Cultural Differences

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Identify ways to manage cultural differences in the workplace.

FIGURE 8.9 The 3 Rs of managing cultural differences.

Recognizing differences consists of first selecting which cultural dimension(s) to examine and

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Animation: Managing Cultural DifferencesAnimation: Managing Cultural Differences

Recognizing differences consists of first selecting which cultural dimension(s) to examine and then assessing their impact on the specific business you are attempting. This may sound easy, but many managers underestimate the challenges that come with bridging cultures. Management styles develop from habits we learn not only from experience as a manager but throughout our lifetime.

For example, Heineken, the Dutch brewing company, bought a large brewery based in Monterrey, Mexico. In connection with the merger, some Mexican employees began working at Heineken's headquarters in Amsterdam. One of these was Carlos, director of marketing for the Dos Equis brand. Carlos relates how he struggled during his first year after the merger, having developed a specific management style throughout his whole life in Mexico that no longer applied. “It is incredible to manage Dutch people, and nothing like my experience leading Mexican teams. I'll schedule a meeting to roll out a new process, and during it, my team starts challenging the process, taking us in various unexpected directions, ignoring my process altogether, and paying no attention to the fact that they work for me. Sometimes I just watch them, astounded. Where is the respect?” says Carlos. “I know this treating-everyone-as-pure- equals thing is the Dutch way, so I keep quiet and try to be patient. But often I just feel like getting down on my knees and pleading, ‘Dear colleagues, in case you haven't forgotten, I. AM. THE. BOSS.’”

Respect Differences Once you have recognized cultural differences, the next step is to respect them. Respect is defined as esteem for the worth of a culture. Demonstrating such respect might mean changing and adapting your own views of the world to better appreciate the elements of that culture. To shift your perspective in this way, you need to do two things—decenter then recenter.

To decenter means that you take what you have learned about another's culture and use that knowledge to adapt your own behavior and thinking. Stand back from someone's culture and try to understand why people in the culture do what they do, to identify the underlying assumptions behind the behaviors you observe. Once you understand the underlying context, you will be able to see the value in the norms and customs of that culture.

After decentering, the next step is to recenter. Recentering is finding or creating shared ground, or areas of overlap between old and new behaviors and understanding. To recenter, you first need to identify the situation and then adjust your thinking or behavior to it, rather than defaulting to your cultural conditioning. This adaptation doesn't necessarily mean you agree with the differences, but it does mean you can relate to the situation. For example, during team meetings in the United States, employees analyze information and make decisions. In Korea, however, team meetings are often held to publicly confirm decisions that smaller groups of team members have already made. The intensive discussion before the meeting explores everything just as thoroughly as the U.S. model does, but it saves face for the participants by ensuring that any conflict is aired in private rather than in public.

This example shows how much we take for granted by thinking everyone has the same assumptions about the purpose of meetings. In Mexico, a meeting is a time to build relationships and learn trust. Once you trust someone, decisions can be made quickly and easily at any time. In the Netherlands, a meeting may be a time to identify the weaknesses of a particular plan.

Reconcile Differences

Animation: Managing Cultural DifferencesAnimation: Managing Cultural Differences

Reconcile Differences

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Reconcile Differences Although respecting differences helps you find common ground with others, it doesn't necessarily mean you can simply blend everything together and make good decisions. For good decisions, you need to apply knowledge and cultural empathy to the task of reconciling differences. That means bringing different cultures into agreement or harmony in a way that allows all concerned to work toward a common goal or objective. You will need to solicit uncommon information, leverage ideas, and make a plan.

Uncommon information is information not available to all the decision makers. It can be special skills or relationships, intelligence, or experience, or even restricted data or access. Social psychologists have found that the component pieces of information for a “best option” are most often spread among group members. Consider this real-life exchange among a culturally diverse team of managers from a national bank. The team was reviewing its decision-making process, and one of the managers said, “Actually, I think we've been very good. We listen to everyone. We always make sure we ask whether anyone disagrees with where we're going.”

Another manager concurred. “I think you're right.… We get all the right ideas out from everyone, right, gang?” After a few more minutes of this self-congratulation, one woman, originally from Korea, cleared her throat and tentatively raised her hand. She took a deep breath and said, “Not one of you understands how hard it is for me to talk in meetings with you. I have to rehearse everything I'm going to say fifteen times in my mind.… Half the time, by the time I say my piece, you think you've gone beyond the point, and my information doesn't get considered. What frustrates me most is that the team really isn't getting my best ideas, the ones that could make a difference!” In the silence that followed, one of the men quietly said that, as an Indonesian, he also struggled to be heard by the rest of the group.

By adjusting the way meetings were run so that members took turns expressing ideas and everyone took time to consider each person's thoughts, the team was able to reconcile some of those differences. Soon they were generating a broader pool of ideas to draw from. For example, members assigned one person the role of “process leader.” This person was given responsibility to curb the dominance of any individual and invite more participation from members who tended to be quieter.

Another approach to soliciting uncommon information is to change the way meetings are run in order to incorporate different cultural styles. This gives everyone a chance to contribute in a comfortable way. For example, the team began asking for feedback on discussion items and concerns to be exchanged via email before meetings took place, allowing critical or dissenting voices a safe forum in which to voice their concerns and suggestions. Members also began allowing time at the beginning of the meeting to discuss personal items not necessarily related to the agenda that day—creating a time for people to build personal relationships and trust.

Soliciting uncommon information is necessary to effectively reconcile differences, but it's not enough. The shared knowledge has to be applied by the group or company, and this can be the hardest part. People from one culture might be more reluctant to implement practices from another culture because of the not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome. The NIH syndrome is a process in which a person or group resists accepting new ideas from culturally different persons or groups inside or outside the organization. It causes an unwillingness to apply knowledge, and it may spring from a person's lack of appreciation for new knowledge. Because its origin is culturally distinct, it can be overcome by developing a shared vision and a common understanding that bridge the cultural divide so that people can focus on the results, not on the process.

Concept Check 8.3 ! "

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Concept Check 8.3

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Question 1

Creating common ground can help improve cross-cultural communication by which of the following?

Making language less complex

Providing a shared context

Reducing the need for language

Making body language irrelevant