Appendix 12. Intercultural communication

Intercultural communication is a very important part of modern world. This term can be explained as a way of how people from different countries and cultures act, communicate and perceive the world around them.

Read short articles about different cultures and try to find the way out of the curious situations given below.

Part 1.The Ring or «OK», this gesture was popularized in the USA during the early nineteenth century, apparent­ly by the newspapers that, at the time, were starting a craze of using initials to shorten common phrases.

There are many different views about what the initials «OK» stand for, some believing it stood for «all correct» while others say that it means the opposite of «knock-out» that is, K.O. Another popular theory is that it is an abbreviation of «Old Kinderhook», from the birthplace of a nine­teenth century American president who used the initials as a campaign slogan.

Which theory is the correct one we may never know, but it seems that the ring itself represents the letter «O» in the «OK» signal. The - «OK» mean­ing is common to all English-speaking coun­tries and, although its meaning is fast spread­ing across Europe and Asia, it has other origins and meanings in certain places. For example, in France it also means «zero» or «nothing»; in Japan it can mean «money»; in some Mediterranean countries it is an orifice signal, often used to infer that a man is homosexual.

Situation

You have come to the USA on the exchange program. Once you invited a beautiful French girl to lunch. You were discussing your entering university when suddenly you used the sign «okay» to say that you had coped with your entrance exams perfectly. But the girl understood your sign wrong. She thought that you had failed your entrance exams. Try to explain to the girl this misunderstanding.

Answer the questions

1. Do you feel surprised or offended? Why?

2. What would you say to your friend in this situation?

3. What should we do to prevent cultural misunderstandings?

4. Do you know any signs that can lead to misconduct?

Part 2. All cultures can be subdivided into two types: universalist cultures and particularist ones. People from universalist cultures believe that there are certain absolutes that apply across the board, regardless of circumstances or the particular situation. What is right is always right. Wherever possible, you should try to apply the same rules to everyone in like situations. People from particularist cultures believe that how you behave in a given situation depends on the circumstances. What is right in one situation may not be right in another. You treat fam­ily, friends, and your ingroups the best you can, and you let the rest of the world take care of itself. (Their ingroups will protect them.) One's ingroups and outgroups are clearly distinguished. There will always be exceptions made for certain people. No culture, of course, will be exclusively universalist or particularist; all cultures will have elements of both poles – but cultures do tend to be more one than the other.

Situation 1

You are from a particularist culture, but you have emigrated recently to another country (a more universalist culture), where your good friend Mrs. Thompson lives and where you have been offered a job in the company where her husband works. You started work a few months ago, and everything went well until recently when you started having trouble with the day-care ar­rangements for your daughter. Because of this problem, you have been arriving an hour or more late to work at least twice a week. Yesterday Mr. Thompson, who manages the division you work in, complained to you about your tardiness and explained that you could not continue to come in late or you would get a reprimand in your personnel file.

You asked Mr. Thompson to do what he could to help you, but he explained that this was the standard policy and that to treat you differently would not be fair to the other employees. You are very hurt to be treated just like every other employee. After all, you are not just any employee; you are the friend of Mrs. Thompson and her husband. Friends make exceptions for friends, and other people understand this. You would certainly help them if they were in trouble. What should you do now?

Answer the questions

1. Do you feel surprised or offended? Why?

2. Why do you think Mr. Thomson behaves this way?

3. What would you say to him in this situation?

4. What do you think about match-making?

5. Do you believe the success of work doesn’t depend on the match-making?

Situation 2

You are riding in a car driven by a close friend when he hits a pedestrian. There are no other witnesses and the pedestrian is bruised but not badly hurt. The speed limit in this part of town is 20 miles an hour, but you noticed that your friend was driv­ing 35. His lawyer tells you that if you testify under oath that your friend was driving 20, he will suffer no serious consequences.

Answer the questions

1. Would you testify that your friend was driving 20 miles an hour? Why?

2. Would you change your answer if the pedestrian was badly hurt and your friend was going to suffer more serious conse­quences?

3. Percentage of Americans who said they would not testify that their friend was driving 20 miles an hour: 96%. Percentage of Venezuelans who said they would not: 34%. Why do you think people from the USA and Venezuela answered this way?

4. Do you believe that while life isn't nec­essarily fair, you can make it more fair by treating everyone the same or by treating everyone as unique? Why?

5. Do you think it is reasonable to lay your personal feelings aside (where possible) and look at situations objectively? Why?

6. What culture – universalist (like Americans) or particularist (like Venezuelans) – would you prefer to live and work, if you had choice? Why?

Situation 3

You come from a universalist culture, but you live and work in a particularist one. You have been asked to fill a vacancy in the division you manage, and you have been reviewing the qualifications of various candidates. You intend to select Mr. Chu, a man who has worked his way up through the organization. He scores the highest on all the criteria against which the candi­dates are being measured, namely, education, work experience, technical skills, and knowledge of the job and the organization.

You are surprised and disappointed to learn that your boss, who gives final approval, wants to hire the nephew of a certain well-connected family who may be in a position to steer a large government contract to your company. You believe this is very unfair with respect to Mr. Chu and that it is not good in the long run for the company to hire someone who does not have the skills to do the job. What do you do?

Answer the questions

1. Why do you think your boss behaved this way?

2. Would you say anything to your boss in such a situation or prefer to keep silence?

3. What do you think about match-making? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy?

4. What would you prefer – to hire Mr. Chu and make him responsible for the contract involved or not to interfere in this process?

Part 3. One of the most important and frequently troublesome work-related cultural differences involves the phenomenon known as power distance. The significance of power distance actually extends well beyond the workplace, having as its focus the attitude of a society toward inequality—how cultures deal with distinctions between people in their access to power and their level of status—but it manifests especially strongly in work-place relations. In its most conspicuous manifestation, it determines the proper role of managers and subordinates and thenature of their interactions. Brief descriptions of the two poles of this concept, high and low power distance, are given below.

High Power Distance: These cultures accept that in­equalities in power and status are natural or existen­tial. People accept that some among them will have more power and influence than others, in the same way they accept that some people are taller than oth­ers. Those with power tend to emphasize it, to hold it close and not delegate or share it, and to distinguish themselves as much as possible from those who do not have power. They are, however, expected to ac­cept the responsibilities that go with power, espe­cially that of looking after those beneath them. Subordinates are not expected to take initiative and are closely supervised.

Low Power Distance: People in these cultures see inequalities in power and status as man-made and largely artificial; it is not natural, though it may be conve­nient, that some people have power over others. Those with power, therefore, tend to deemphasize it, to minimize the differences between themselves and subordinates, and to delegate and share power to the extent possible. Subordinates are rewarded for taking initiative and do not like close supervision.

No culture, of course, will be exclusively high or low in power distance – all cultures will have elements of both poles—but cultures do tend to be more one than the other. As always, individuals in any given culture, because of personal differences, can be anywhere along the continuum, and may very well be at one spot in one set of circumstances and somewhere else in another set. On the whole, however, you should expect to find most individuals on the same side of the dichotomy as their culture in general.

Situation 1

You have been posted overseas with a nonprofit foreign aid or­ganization. Your area of expertise is environmental cleanup, and the country in which you work is trying to recover from decades of abusing its natural resources, especially water. You are in charge of setting up a demonstration water-filtering plant in a certain district, but you are encountering strong resistance from the district supervisor. He wants to know if this technique has been tried anywhere else in his country, and when you say no, he asks why he should let you "experiment at [his] expense."

You point out that it's very important to see if this tech­nique will work in his country. If it doesn't, then how much better it will be to know that now before going ahead and in­stalling these plants in every district. He will be a hero for spon­soring this trial.

He says he will lose his job if this high-profile experiment fails and asks you why you can't know ahead of time if the plant is going to work. If you're not sure it's going to work, then you should spend more time perfecting the technology. "When the technology is perfect, then you can try it out in my district," he says. What do you do?

Answer the questions

1. Why do you think your supervisor behave this way?

2. Would you continue conduction of the experiment or prefer to stop?

3. What do you think about the improvement of the technology before starting the experiment?

4. What culture – high or low power distant – would you prefer to live and work, if you had choice? Why?

Situation 2

You are a team leader in the technical support division of a company working with new species of plant in a low power distance culture. Your company is famous for its informal and flat organizational culture: there are few layers of management and your engineers work for the most part on their own, only coming to you when they have a problem or a question. Your company has recently entered into an agreement with an offshore partner (in a high power distance culture) to provide you with software program­mers for one of your important projects. These programmers will be with you for an eighteen-month period, and now, after the arrival of the first group, there are some problems.

The programmers do not seem willing or able to work with­out very close supervision and, in fact, seem unwilling to take responsibility for their work. They expect you to make even the most routine decisions, and they always check with you before undertaking even moderately important tasks. In dealing with internal clients (divisions that you and these foreign program­mers are developing software for), they always defer to you and do not give these clients answers to their questions or responses to their requests on the spot, although it is well within their job description to do so. All this means you're having to spend a lotmore time with these people than you should, so much that you have almost no time for your other employees. What should you do?

Answer the questions

1. Do you feel surprised? Why?

2. Why do you think your colleagues behave this way?

3. How would you cope with this situation?

4. Would you agree to supervise programmers and tell them what they should do?

5. Would you speak with programmers and explain to them what they should do and why and what they are responsible for?

Situation 3

You are an expatriate adviser working in an AIDS education program in a developing country. Your sponsoring organization has designed a peer teaching project that involves training high school seniors in basic AIDS prevention techniques, which they then teach to younger teenagers in special after-school workshops. Research in your own culture has shown that when teens get this particular message from other, older teens, they pay much more attention than when an adult lectures them on this topic.

Your organization has conducted a number of training ses­sions around the country for the seniors, a cadre of whom has already begun to hold the after-school workshops. At a meeting with an official from the Ministry of Health today, you heard that there have been numerous complaints about these work­shops from teachers around the country. The teachers maintain that to have high school seniors holding classes undermines the teachers' respect and credibility. Apparently, there have already been discipline problems in some schools. "We put teachers on a pedestal in our culture," this official explained to you, "because of the high regard we hold for knowledge and a sound educa­tion. To have students teaching other students makes our teachers look bad." Now what?

Answer the questions

1. Why do you think Ministry of Health behaves this way? What are the real reasons for it?

2. What would you say to the representative of the Ministry of Health in this situation?

3. Would you continue to implement your project or prefer to quit it?

4. Do you really think that your project could make teachers look bad? Why? Why not?

Situation 4

You are an expatriate from a low power distance culture living in a high power distance country. You were about to return to your home culture when a large corporation in the overseas country hired you. They were looking in particular for the kind of marketing expertise your company is famous for. Now that you have been on board for a few months, you're not having a good time. Although these people say they hired you for your marketing know-how, whenever you try to make suggestions or changes in the way your new company does business, you meet with resistance.

Today your boss has had an unusually frank discussion with you, laying out the reasons for the trouble you're having. He says your problem is that you are too outspoken and don't know your place. You disagree with your superiors in front of others and sometimes correct them in front of others when they say something wrong. You also make too many decisions without checking with other people, even though, as your boss admits, you know more about the subject than those people do.

Now you're confused. You thought you'd been hired for what you know, but whenever you try to put what you know into practice, your supervisors seem offended. What do you do now?