Chapter 4 Flashcards
Define the term culture, and explain how societal culture and organisational culture combine to influence on-the-job behaviour.
- Culture is a set of beliefs and values about what is desirable and undesirable in a community of people, and a set of formal or informal practices to support the values.
- Culture has both prescriptive and descriptive elements and involves taken-for-granted assumptions about how to think, act, and feel.
- Culture overrides national boundaries.
- Key aspects of societal culture, such as customs and language, are brought to work by the individual
- Working together, societal and organisational culture influence the person’s values, ethics, attitudes and expectations
Define ethnocentrism, and explain how to develop cultural intelligence.
- Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s native culture, language, and ways of doing things are superior to all others.
- Cultural intelligence, the ability to interpret ambiguous cross-cultural situations, is an extension of emotional intelligence. It can be developed through comprehensive experience with foreign people and cultures
Distinguish between high-context and low-context cultures and identify and describe the nine cultural dimensions from Project GLOBE.
- People from low-context cultural dimensions infer relatively less from situational cues and extract more meaning from spoken and written words.
- In high-context cultures, such as China and Japan, managers prefer slow negotiations and trust-building meetings, which tend to frustrate low-context Northern Europeans and North Americans, who prefer to get right down to business.
GLOBE Cultural dimensions:
- power distance
- uncertainty avoidance
- institutional collectivism
- in-group collectivism
- gender egalitarianism
- assertiveness
- future orientation
- performance orientation
- humane orientation
Distinguish between individualistic and collectivist cultures, and explain the difference between monochronic and polychronic cultures.
- People in individualistic cultures think primarily in terms of “I” and “me”, and place high value on freedom and personal choice.
- Collectivist cultures teach people to be “we” and “us” oriented and to subordinate personal wishes and goals to the interest of the relevant social unit (such as family, group, organisation, etc.)
- People in monochronic culture are schedule driven and prefer to do one think at a time. To them, time is like money; it is spent wisely or wasted.
- In polychronic cutures, there is a tendency to do many things at once and to perceive time as flexible and multidimensional. Polychronic people view monochronic people as being too preoccupied with time.
Specify the practical lesson from the Hofstede cross-cultural study, and explain what Project GLOBE researchers discovered about leadership.
- There is no one best way to manage across cultures.
- Management theories and practices need to be adapted to the local culture.
- GLOBE: identified leader attributes that are universally liked and disliked:
Liked: trustworthiness, dynamic, motive arouser, decisive, and intelligent: charismatic leadership, which is widely applicable.
Disliked: noncooperative, irritable, egocentric: should be avoided in all cultures
Discuss the results and practical significance of the recent Bloom and Van Reenen study of national management styles.
- There is no one-best world-wide style of management
- Foreign multi-national companies are being better managed than local ones
- Foreign managers need to adapt their style to local preferences
- Foreign managers would be good role models.
Explain why US managers have a comparatively high failure rate on foreign assignments.
- American expatriates are troubled by personal and family adjustment problems and homesickness.
- A great deal of money is wasted when expatriates come home early.
- More extensive cross-cultural training is needed.
Summarise the research findings about North American women on foreign assignments
- Number of North American women on foreign assignments is small, but growing
- Self-disqualification and prejudicial home-county supervisors and staffing policies are often to blame
- Foreigners tend to view North-American women primarily as foreigners and secondarily as women
- NA women have high success rates on foreign assignments
- Language skills, foreign experience, networking, family and supervisory support etc can increase the chances of getting a desired foreign assignment for both women and men
Identify four stages of the foreign assignment cycle, and the OB trouble spot associated with each stage.
- selection and training (unrealistic expectations)
- arrival and adjustment (culture shock)
- settling in and acculturating (lack of support)
- Returning home and adjusting (reentry shock)
What is Proxemics?
- Hall’s term for the study of cultural expectations about interpersonal space.
- Divided in intimate distance, personal distance, social distance and public distance
- Different across cultures
