What are Cross Cultural Differences?

The way culture imprints itself on the manner a person thinks, acts, perceives the environment and reacts to things around him/her is very strong and virtually indelible. Culture determines every aspect of human behavior and gives rise to cultural identity in addition to national and our own individual identity. Amazingly, nearly all this imprinting is done before we reach the age of seven.

Regardless of the organization you join, you are likely to be dealing with people who come from various national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Communicating across language and cultural barriers at home will challenge your skills. Without leaving your own country, you're likely to come into contact with people from a variety of backgrounds who work in your company, industry, and community. Cross cultural differences are all around us.

How then can we assess cultural understanding to help us in our day-to-day relationships? First, it is important to understand and identify aspects of culture that lead to creating the way we think and behave. Also, we need to understand that the cultural spectrum holds different shades for a person, a society and a nation, helping each of them adapt to a common collective identity. In the process of evolving this collective identity, culture transcends its traditional role of providing a set of beliefs, customs, norms, values, ethics, traditions, moral, social and legal codes, perceptions, and philosophy. It becomes the overall physical framework for the society to function - it becomes the institutions that govern and the schools that educate, for example. These are all manifestations of culture.

In addition, culture is strongly related with geographical setting of a place, religion, ethnicity and race, and explains why different countries have different cultures and also why places on a sea coast share common elements of culture that are quite different from the cultures of mountainous places.

Cultural understanding derives from dovetailing all these cross cultural differences and creating awareness about how these differences impact the way people think, speak and behave. One of the biggest issues to affect relationships is that of not understanding why one person has a particular viewpoint or approach. Their approach may simply not make sense to you. And what is worse, you have no language or framework with which to begin to discuss your differences. You cannot have a discussion about it because you don't know where to start.

Differences can be as small as having a different understanding about what time ‘dinner time' is; what a ‘family butcher' is, what ‘as soon as possible ‘ means, or even ‘when you are in mood to do this or that'.

Cross cultural differences can be the cause of many underlying problems that most people will not recognize stem from that. Often these differences are not brought to the surface and slowly build in to resentment affecting people's performance at work. It's important when you are working with multi-cultural staff to promote sensitivity to diversity, respectfulness and good intercultural communication.

1. Do you agree that the way culture imprints itself on us is very strong and virtually indelible? Give your reasons.

2. Is it possible to assess cultural understanding to help people in their day-to-day relationships? Explain how.

3. What are the biggest issues to affect human relationships?

4. What is important for a manager to do when working with multi-cultural staff?

Text 2

Read the text and be ready to answer the following questions:

1. What can you say about the role of a manager while working across national borders?

2. What is meant by the expression “an effective global manager”? What are the criteria? What other criteria can you offer?

3. What is intercultural management?

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31