Summary Managing cultural differences
Disclaimer: the summaries of the lectures are an extension to the articles which have been
summarized. Therefore, in order to fore come repetition, some key concepts may only be
addressed in the lecture weeks and not in the articles. Therefore, it is very important to study
both lectures and articles.
1: Managing yourself; making it overseas – M. Javidan, M. Teagarden & D. Bowen 2010
A good track record of employees cannot always be considered as a predictor to success
abroad. Moving people around the world is vital for developing global leadership
capabilities, but is seldom enough. “Plenty of smart, talented executives fail spectacularly in
expatriate roles”.
- Engagement with employees at all levels is very important. Formal and informal relations
are an important prerequisite for this.
- Success abroad hinges on something called a ‘global mindset’. This mindset has 3
components:
1. Intellectual capital (knowledge of international business and capacity to learn)
2. Psychological capacity (openness to different cultures and capacity to change)
3. Social capital (the ability to form connections, bring people together and influence
stakeholders).
- It should be established what global leadership means for a company, before they will be
able to effectively implement it.
- The three components of a global mindset are defined by three specific attributes:
1. Intellectual capital (easiest to develop of the three)
- Global savvy (a strong grasp of how the industry operates worldwide, how global
customers behave, how your competitors target their needs and habits, and how strategic
risk varies by geography)
- Cognitive complexity (the ability to piece together multiple scenarios with many moving
parts, without becoming paralyzed by the number of options)
- Cosmopolitan outlook (the ability to piece together multiple scenarios with many moving
parts, without becoming paralyzed by the number of options).
2. Psychological capacity (hardest to develop)
- Passion for diversity (a penchant for exploring other parts of the world, experiencing other
cultures, and trying new ways of doing things)
- Thirst for adventure (an appreciation for and ability to thrive in unpredictable and complex
environments)
- Self-assurance (self-confidence, a sense of humor, a willingness to take risks in new
contexts, and high levels of energy; the ability to be energized, rather than drained, by a
foreign context)
3. Social capital
- Intercultural empathy (engage and connect with other people from other parts of the
world)
,- Interpersonal impact (the ability to bring together divergent views, develop consensus, and
maintain credibility; and skill at building networks—not just with peers and senior leaders
but with other, less obvious potential connections)
- Diplomacy (listening to what is said and what is not said, ease in conversations with people
who are different from you, and a greater inclination to ask than to answer).
2: Research edge: toward cultural intelligence: turning cultural differences into a workplace
advantage – C. Early & E. Mosakowski 2004
- Culture has traditionally been the domain of anthropology, with anthropologists often
intensively studying one community. This usually occurred at an ‘aggregate’ level, meaning
that commonalities at a country-level are identified.
- A next step in the evolution was the introduction of cross-cultural management. Here, an
‘individual’ approach was adopted to seek how an individual’s action is part or an
organization.
- These approaches take a macro or top-down approach.
- The overarching approach to cultural differences has been useful in early days, but suffered
“ecological fallacy”. This means that the difficulty one encounters when taking a generalized
cultural value and assuming that it applies to all individuals within a given culture.
- Work environment impacts work activity and employee behavior through a person’s self-
knowledge. Many recent approaches have emphasized that there is a need to improve
cultural understanding at an individual level.
- A manager’s capability to adjust to new cultures is what we call cultural intelligence (CQ)
A cultural intelligence framework.
Adaptation to new cultural situations require three interdependent strengths of thinking,
energizing and acting. The following three elements are at the core of CQ:
1. The head (Mostly cognitive. Refers to what you know and how you can gain
knowledge, strategically ‘thinking about thinking’)
- Specific strategies for learning to learn & cultural intuition
2. The heart (Motivational skills. Refers to energizing your actions and building personal
confidence. In case of failure reenergize.)
3. The body (Behavioral means. Refers to the action component of cultural intelligence,
how to act properly. You can use social mimicry, which is the use of gestures which
creates a flow of goodwill.)
Five basic profiles can be defined regarding the framework
1. The local (experiences problems with people working abroad)
2. The analyst (someone who can think strategically and who has a natural institution of
what is happening in new cultural situations)
3. The confident (person with great personal confidence possessing focused goals about
working with foreign people. Most common manifestation of CQ)
4. The mimic (manager who has effective control over behavior and action. Imitation is part
of the mimic, which is an important way to create a comfort zone and facilitate
communication)
, 5. Cultural chameleon (person possessing all three CQ features)
A manager will probably fall into a combination of the five stances.
3: When global virtual teams share knowledge: media richness, cultural difference and
language commonality – A. Klitmoller & J. Lauring 2013
- Virtual teams are based in individuals collaborating in geographically dispersed work
groups and who may reside in different time zones and countries.
- Communication in face-to-face teams is more effective because media disrupts
conversation patterns.
- Rich media, e.g. videoconferencing allow for backchanneling verbal and nonverbal signs of
support or disagreement
- Lean media, however, removes social presence cues and thereby a joint contextual
background may lead to communicational breakdown.
- Media Richness Theory (MRT) proposes that team members engage in communication in
order to reduce complexity about a given task and that media differ in their ability to handle
multiple, conflicting interpretations of sent information. MRT prescribes rich media usage for
complex, equivocal messages and lean media for sharing simple and explicit (canonical)
information.
The richer the media is, the more cues on a given task will be provided, and the more
equivocality will be reduced.
(equivocal; open to more than one interpretation, ambiguous. Canonical; simple and
explicit)
- Face-to-face communications is interpreted as the optimal solution for sharing equivocal
knowledge if the teams included members from different cultures. Furthermore, physical
presence enhances knowledge sharing and team performance. Employee’s functioning as
brokers between two different countries can increase effectivity and reduce the time needed
to fulfill a job.
- Face-to-face communication is more effective for equivocal knowledge sharing than virtual
communication.
- In virtual settings, cultural differences and low language commonality are negatively
associated with communication effectiveness.
- In situations with high cultural difference, rich media communication will be more effective
for equivocal knowledge sharing than lean media.
- In situations with high cultural difference, lean media will be more effective for canonical
knowledge sharing than rich media.
- In situations with low degree of language commonality, lean media will be more effective
for equivocal knowledge sharing than rich media.
- In situations with low degree of language commonality, rich media will be more effective
for canonical knowledge sharing than lean media.
