DIVERSITY & CULTURE IN BUSINESS Flashcards
means that a company offers every employee an equal opportunity for work and advancement. Equity ensures equal possible outcomes for all employees
Equity
means that a company welcomes every employee, whatever their identity, and helps them to feel they are an integral part of the organization.
Inclusion
the set of values, beliefs, rules, and institutions held by a specific group of people.
culture
Belief that one’s own ethnic group or culture is superior to that of others.
ethnocentricity
Detailed knowledge about a culture that enables a person to work happily and effectively within it. It improves people’s ability to manage employees, market products, and conduct negotiations in other countries.
cross-cultural literacy
A group of people who share a unique way of life within a larger, dominant culture.
subculture
is a very visible and foundational feature of culture that influences personal communication. Surface fea tures such as navigable rivers and flat plains facilitate travel and contact with others
physical environment
- All the technology used in a culture to manufacture goods and provide services.
material culture
- Ideas, beliefs, and customs to which people are emotionally attached.
Values
Positive or negative evaluations, feelings, and tendencies that individuals harbor toward objects or concepts.
Attitude
Positive or negative evaluations, feelings, and tendencies that individuals harbor toward objects or concepts.
Attitudes
Comprises those aspects a culture considers “good taste” in the arts, in the imagery evoked by certain expressions, and in the symbolism of certain colors.
Aesthetics
- Appropriate ways of behaving, speaking, and dressing in a culture.
Manners
Habits or ways of behaving in specific circumstances that are passed down through generations in a culture.
Customs
- Behavior, often dating back several generations, that is practiced by a homogeneous group of people.
folk custom
Behavior shared by a heterogeneous group or by several groups.
popular custom -
A culture’s fundamental organization, including its groups and institutions, its system of social positions and their relationships, and the process by which its resources are distributed.
social structure
- Collection of two or more people who identify and interact with each other.
social group -
is a small group of people who share close personal relationships that form early in life and endure through time.
primary group
- is larger, less personal, and less enduring than a primary group. Secondary groups typically develop later in life and are established to achieve a specific goal such as company employees belonging to a project team.
secondary group
is one that people use as a standard (or reference) for their own prefer ences, beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.
reference group
- consists of a person’s immediate relatives, including parents, brothers, and sisters.
reference group
consists of a person’s immediate relatives, including parents, brothers, and sisters.
nuclear family
broadens the nuclear family and adds grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and relatives through marriage.
extended family
Process of ranking people into social layers or classes.
social stratification -
Ease with which individuals can move up or down a culture’s “social ladder.”
social mobility -
- System of social stratification in which people are born into a social ranking, or caste, with little or no opportunity for social mobility.
caste system
System of social stratification in which personal ability and actions determine social status and mobility.
class system
- Departure of highly educated people from one profession, geographic region, or nation to another.
brain drain
System of conveying thoughts, feelings, knowledge, and information through speech, writing, and actions.
Communication
Employees in certain markets feel comfortable question ing superiors or seeking additional explanation if something doesn’t seem quite right. Yet a manager working abroad must sometimes work hard to ascertain what local workers think because they might not be accustomed to questioning authority figures.
IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS
Advertising slogans and company documents must be translated care fully so that messages are received precisely as intended. If they are not carefully translated, a company can make a language blunder in its international business dealings.
LANGUAGE BLUNDERS
Third or “link” language understood by two parties who speak different native languages.
lingua franca
Language communicated through unspoken cues, including hand gestures, facial expressions, physical greetings, eye contact, and the manipulation of personal space.
body language
People in different cultures often perceive time differently. Famed anthropologist Edward T. Hall distinguished between two types of cultures based on time perception.
Perception of Time
Whereas some cultures display a strong work ethic, others achieve more balance in juggling work and leisure. Some people in southern France like to say they work to live, whereas some people in the United States live to work.
View of Work
Anything that represents a culture’s way of life, including gestures, material objects, traditions, and concepts.
cultural trait
Process whereby cultural traits spread from one culture to another
cultural diffusion
- Replacement of one culture’s traditions, folk heroes, and artifacts with substitutes from another.
cultural imperialism
framework Framework for studying cultural differences along six dimensions, such as focus on past or future events and belief in individual or group responsibility for personal well-being.
Kluckhohn–Strodtbeck
Framework for studying cultural differences along six dimensions, such as individualism versus collectivism and equality versus inequality.
Hofstede framework
