Cultural Differences and Communication Management

pagan Differences and Communication ManagementThe same person, thus, raft belong to several different cultures depending on his or her birthplace nationality ethnicity family status gender age language education physical condition sexual orientation religion profession place of make believe and its corporate culture.Culture is the lens through which you view the world. It is central to what you see, how you make sense of what you see, and how you express yourself.http//www.1000ventures.com/ten3_operations/customized/cross-cultural_differences_china-us.htmlFour Cultural DimensionsCultures both national and organizational differ along many a nonher(prenominal) dimensions. Four of the most important atomic number 181. Directness (get to the summit versus imply the meats)2. Hierarchy (follow orders versus engage in debate)3. Consensus (dissent is accepted versus unanimity is needed)4. personal identity (individual winners versus team effectiveness)7http//www.1000ventures.com/ ten3_operations/customized/cross-cultural_differences_china-us.htmlCross-Cultural Communication ChallengesCulture is often at the root of communication challenges. Exploring historical experiences and the ways in which various cultural groups have link to each other is key to opening channels for cross-cultural communication. Becoming more aw are of cultural differences, as well as exploring cultural similarities, give the sack admirer you communicate with others more effectively. Next time you find yourself in a confusing situation, ask yourself how culture may be shaping your birth reactions, and try to see the world from the others point of view.http//www.1000ventures.com/ten3_operations/customized/cross-cultural_differences_china-us.htmlCultural DifferencesIn around cultures, looking people in the eye is assumed to indicate honesty and straightforwardness in others it is seen as challenging and rude. most people in Arab cultures share a great deal of eye contact and may re gard as well little as disrespectful. In English culture, a certain amount of eye contact is required, but too much makes many people uncomfortable. Most English people make eye contact at the beginning and then let their gaze drift to the side periodi cla genuinely to avoid gaze the other person out. In South Asian and many other cultures direct eye contact is generally regarded as aggressive and rude.In some cultures and religious groups eye contact surrounded by men and women is seen as flirtatious or threatening. Men of these communities who do non make eye contact with women are not usually rude or evasive, but respectful. Different cultures also vary in the amount that it is acceptable to watch other people. Some experts call these high-look and low-look cultures. British culture is a low-look culture. Watching other people, especially strangers, is regarded as intrusive. People who are caught staring usually look away quickly and are often embarrassed. Those being watched may feel threatened and insulted. In high-look cultures, for example in southern Europe, looking or gazing at other people is perfectly acceptable being watched is not a problem. When peoples expectations and interpretations clash, irritation and misunderstandings can ariseCulture ShockFailure to identify cultural issues and take action can lead to a culture shock. In order of priority, the most often ground symptoms of culture shock are3feeling isolatedanxiety and worry decrease in job performancehigh nervous energyhelplessness.Not coping with culture shock symptoms when they appear can lead to a very negative situation.Respecting Differences and Working TogetherAnthropologists disc everyplaceed that, when faced by interaction that we do not understand, people tend to interpret the others involved as abnormal, weird or wrong5.Awareness of cultural differences and recognizing where cultural differences are at work is the first step toward understanding each other and establishing a positive running(a) environment. Use these differences to challenge your own assumptions about the right way of doing things and as a chance to learn new ways to solve problems.Case point DuPontA US-based multicultural team at DuPont gained around US$45 million in new business by changing the way decorating materials are developed and marketed. The changes included new colors that team members new, from their experience within other cultures, would appeal more to their overseas customers.6Building Trust Across Cultural BoundariesResearch indicates4 that there is a strong correlation between components of trust ( much(prenominal) as communication effectiveness, conflict management, and rapport) and productivity. Cultural differences play a key utilization in the creation of trust, since trust is built in different ways, and means different things in different cultures.For instance, in the U.S., trust is demonstrated performance over time. Here you can gain the trust of your coll eagues by coming through and delivering on time on your commitments. In many other parts of the world, including many Arab, Asian and Latin American countries, building relationships is a pre-requisite for professional interactions. Building trust in these countries often involves lengthy discussions on non-professional topics and shared meals in restaurants. Work-related discussions live only once your counterpart has become comfortable with you as a person.Cultural differences in multicultural teams can create misunderstandings between team members onward they have had a chance to establish any credibility with each other. Thus, building trust is a critical step in creation and festering of such teams. As a manager of a multicultural team, you need to recognize that building trust between different people is a knotty process, since each culture has its own way of building trust and its own interpretation of what trust is.Anthropologists in cross-cultural managementObserving pe ople in Sydney made me quite clear that the dominant focus of cross-cultural academics and practitioners on national cultures is problematic. People from so-many cultural background study and work in nigh cooperation at universities and public and private organisations. Looking at your Indian, English, Dutch, Japanese or German colleague as representatives of fixed national cultures will not help you very much in your collaboration. The so-called essentialistic perspective has become very popular in contemporary management literature and consultancy and is highlighted by European authors, such as Hofstede (1990) and Trompenaars (1993). The work of Hofstede and Trompenaars, who have developed cultural maps of the world in which each country can be situated based on their slay on different indexes, fitted perfectly in the assumption that culture is a (more or less) stable entity that can be engineered, and managed. However, recent evaluations of these essentialistic cultural program s are not positive in regard to organizational costs and sustainability. The programs use a dramatic oversimplification of the culture concept and make no difference between espoused values and actual behaviour. Consultants of large cross-cultural consultancy firms themselves dont believe in the value of multi value models. alternatively they do use their international sensitiveness and experience to check over managers and employees. In our research on the number one consultancy on cross cultural business in the Netherlands showed that a larger part of the consultants were using anthropological tools and methods rather than the corporate developed multi value models. None of them however, were anthropologists.And this is surprising as international management and the training of managers in cross-cultural affairs should be of the lens nucleus competences of anthropologists. However, anthropologists are not very good at selling their knowledge and skills to corporations. They are outnumbered by all other kind of professions that have taken up cross cultural consultancy. Only recently I have seen a growth of (small) anthropological consultancy firms, but there could be many more of them. The message that everything is more complex than what our cultural competitors bring is of course not a very good argument for selling your services. That could be done better by, for example, presentation in a business case the costs of failures and awkward collaboration.To support managers and organisations operating in a international context, we have explored new directions in cross-cultural management by making managers aware of practices of (cross-cultural) collaboration. The interest is not so much in gaining knowledge of other (national) cultures but rather on spaces and termination objects in which cross cultural collaboration in daily organizational life takes place. Two weeks ago I was working with a large bedevil management firm that had asked help to manage th eir large diversity of workforce. The company had employees of more than 35 different national cultures working in complex projects. Instead of training the management on all these cultures we studied collaboration practices at the workfloor from a socio-material perspective which includes spatial settings, materiality and social behaviour. The French anthropologist Latour called this symmetric anthropology. We found that engineers and project employees of both the company and the client gathered around so-called rollerboards. These are tables that can roll and have large paper drawings of installations on them. approximately the rollerboard 6 different professionals stand, hang and are bending over the drawings. In debating which objects had to be left out, changed or added, each of the 6 professionals got time to explain their view, experience, perspective. If concord upon, different colours were used to materialize the debate and colour the drawings on spots were the debate was on. The manager was surprised as he wanted to fill in the rollerboard by a computer system, which would have ruined this efficient cross-cultural collaborative practice. In this way anthropologists can deliver knowledge and advice that are not given by traditional cross-cultural consultancy firms.