Cultural Intelligence
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Cultural Intelligence

Living and Working Globally

David C. Thomas, Kerr C. Inkson

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eBook - ePub

Cultural Intelligence

Living and Working Globally

David C. Thomas, Kerr C. Inkson

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About This Book

In today's global economy, the ability to interact effectively across cultures is a fundamental job requirement for just about everyone. But it's impossible to learn the customs and traits of every single culture with which you might come into contact. Cultural Intelligence teaches a universal set of techniques and people skills that will allow you to adapt quickly to, and thrive in, any cultural environment.This extensively revised second edition features new real-life examples of CQ working well, drawn from a rich range of cultures and situations. The authors also address the interplay of race and gender with culture factors, and show how developing cultural intelligence can enhance our appreciation of cultural diversity.Cultural Intelligence teaches you to disable the "cultural cruise control" that makes you unaware of how your culture affects your perceptions, and learn to pay careful attention, in a mindful and creative way, to cues in cross-cultural situations. Over time, you'll develop a repertoire of skills appropriate to different intercultural situations.

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CHAPTER 1
Living and Working in the Global Village

LET’S JUST TALK IT OUT
Bob Weber hangs up the telephone and leaps to his feet. Furious, he bounds out of his office in search of his Korean-born administrative assistant, Joanne Park. He has just been berated by his customer in Pennsylvania for not sending the contract for softwood lumber to him on the date specified. This exchange, plus the current volatility in the Canadian stock market, is really making him edgy. As he walks down the hall toward the employee lunchroom, he begins to calm down. He knows he must handle this situation with an employee carefully.
He arrives at the lunchroom and pokes his head in the door.
“Is Joanne here?” He sees her at a table, sharing her lunch with several other administrative staff. He still feels annoyed, but he keeps his voice in control.
“Oh, I see you are in here. I was looking for that contract to Zott Industries that I asked you to type. Did you forget?”
Everyone stops talking. They look uncomfortable. Joanne gets up from the table.
“Oh, Mr. Weber. I am so sorry! I will do it right this minute!”
“No, that’s okay. After lunch is fine. But, we do need to get it out today.” He goes out.
Joanne averts her eyes. She looks miserable. The other staff are looking at each other knowingly.
A few minutes later Bob is sitting behind his desk busily talking on the telephone. Joanne comes in briskly and delivers the contract (with two hands, typical of Korean culture) into Bob’s in-box.
She then turns and goes out just as briskly and closes the door firmly but quietly behind her.
Bob ends his phone call, gets up from his desk, and follows Joanne into the hall. His anger has gone. After all, Joanne has never made such a mistake before. Now he is concerned for her.
“Joanne, can you come in here for a minute.”
Joanne comes in obediently and stands in front of him with her head down, not making eye contact with Bob.
“Is there some sort of a problem here? If so, we need to talk about it.”
There is no response from Joanne.
“Does it have something to do with forgetting to type the contract?”
Joanne nods. She still doesn’t look at him.
He is conciliatory, friendly. “Oh! That was no big deal! It’s done now. Just forget about it. But in the future just make sure and tell me if something is wrong so we can talk it out. Okay?”
Joanne nods again.
Over the next few weeks Joanne takes several days of sick leave, and three weeks later she resigns.
The actions and reactions of Bob Weber and Joanne Park reveal quite different outlooks on resolving a problem at the office. Like most Americans, Bob thinks the best way to resolve conflicts is to have a frank and open discussion about them and work through any differences. In contrast, Joanne’s cultural background tells her that she will never be able to recover the status she had formerly enjoyed after being reprimanded in front of her peers. And being confronted again with her mistake by Bob in his office just added to her loss of face. Both Bob and Joanne continue to operate as if they were totally immersed among others of their own culture.
As a result, both Bob and Joanne endanger the things they value most: Bob, despite his good intentions, has failed to correct the cause of the administrative error and portray himself as a caring boss. And Joanne has left a job in a good organization that she generally enjoyed. If each had been willing and able to accommodate, at least in part, the other’s customs and had made more effort to help the other to understand his or her own customs, Bob might have been able to create an efficient and friendly working environment, and Joanne might have learned some new ways of dealing with her new culture.
For example, Bob might have had some discussions with the other managers who have Korean staff and adjusted some of his managerial style and communication behavior. For her part, Joanne might have noted her own feelings and communicated to Bob how his behavior affected her.
The story of Bob Weber and Joanne Park is typical—it is a story that is enacted again and again in many situations around the world as ordinary people, working both within their own countries and overseas, grapple with the problem of relating to others who are from cultures where things are done differently.
Consider the following examples:
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A British company trying to run a Japanese subsidiary experiences inexplicable problems of morale and conflict with its Japanese workforce. This seems out of character with the usual politeness and teamwork of the Japanese. Later it is found that the British manager of the operation in Japan is not taken seriously because she is a woman.
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Two American managers meet with executives and engineers of a large Chinese electronics firm to present their idea for a joint venture. After several meetings, they notice that different engineers seem to be attending the meetings and that their questions are becoming more technical, so much so that the Americans have difficulty answering them without giving away trade secrets. The Americans think this attempt to gain technological information is ridiculous. Don’t the Chinese have any business ethics? How do they sleep at night? Later they learn that this is common practice and considered to be good business among the Chinese, who often suspect that westerners are interested only in exploiting a cheap labor market.
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In Malaysia, an old woman is struggling to unload some furniture from a cart and carry it into her house. The furniture is heavy, and she stumbles under the weight. Many people crowd the street, but no one makes an effort to offer help. A couple of young American tourists who are passing by see the problem, rush up, and start helping the old lady. The locals on the street seem bemused and perplexed by these Americans helping someone they don’t even know.
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A Canadian manager faces difficulties because his five key subordinates are, respectively, French-Canadian, Indian, Italian-American, Chinese, and Iraqi. How can he treat them equitably? How can he find a managerial style that works with all of them? How should he chair meetings?
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A Dutch couple, an engineer and a teacher who have volunteered for two-year assignments in Sri Lanka to assist local economic development, spend an evening visiting a Sri Lankan couple to whom they have been introduced by a friend. They want to “get a feel for” the Sri Lankan people. Their hosts are gracious and hospitable but much more reserved than the Dutch couple are used to. The guests feel awkward and find it hard to make conversation. Later, they panic because of the ineptitude they felt in dealing with the Sri Lankans.1
These stories provide real-life examples of people from different parts of the world struggling with problems caused by intercultural differences. Do you identify with any of these situations? Do you wonder how to deal with people from other countries, cultures, or ethnic groups? Have you been in situations, like the ones above, that have left you puzzled and frustrated because you simply haven’t felt tuned in to the people you have been dealing with? If so, you are not alone; you are attempting to operate in a multicultural world.

The Global Village

There are seven billion people in the world from myriad different cultures, but we live in a village where events taking place ten thousand miles away seem as close as events happening in the next street. We find ourselves in this global village whenever we read a newspaper or watch television or buy a product from the grocery store shelf. We can watch a Middle East firefight as if we were there, eat tropical fruit with snow on the ground outside, and meet people from far-off exotic places at the local mall. The following dramatic examples of globalization are familiar to almost everyone.
THE GLOBAL WORLD COMES TO THE UNITED STATES
Americans’ consciousness of the increasingly global society that they live in has been powerfully raised by what may turn out to be the two major crises of the first decade of the new millennium.
On September 11, 2001, the world came to America in a new and horrifying way. The young men who flew their hijacked airliners into the great U.S. citadels of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were citizens of the global village. They were operating in a world with a profoundly increased consciousness of difference—haves versus have-nots, Christians versus Muslims—as well as far fewer boundaries. To the terrorists, America was not a distant vision but an outrage beamed nightly into their homes through their televisions, a place they could visit personally for the price of a plane ticket. They slipped easily into the world’s most powerful nation, acquired its language, were accepted by their neighbors, and took flying lessons from friendly, helpful locals. Most likely they tuned in to U.S. television at night and paid special attention to the regular bulletins on conflict in the Middle East.
The news of the attacks traveled, virtually instantaneously, to all corners of the world. Californians stared aghast at the strange horrors of the day’s breakfast show. Europeans interrupted their shopping to crowd around television screens in appliance store windows. Australians phoned each other in the night and said, “Switch your telly on.” A billion viewers around the globe watched as the Twin Towers collapsed in front of their eyes.
After September 11, people struggled to understand. Who were these people who had plunged the world into crisis? Where were they from? What did they believe? What was it in the ever more complicated cause-and-effect kaleidoscope of global economics and politics that America had done to cause such bitter enmity among these terrorists and their supporters?
In October 2008 people around the world again watched in horror as the financial morass labeled by the term subprime mortgages quickly spread into their lives. Some of the biggest and apparently most impregnable financial institutions suddenly went out of business, crippled by multibillion-dollar debts. Flows of credit—the lifeblood of business—froze, stock markets plunged, and memories of the horrors of the Great Depression of the 1930s were revived. The president of the United States quickly called his top advisers together to put together a rescue package, and within a few days a $700 billion government “bailout” of stricken banks was announced—a de facto reversal of the country’s most cherished principles of free-market capitalism.
Despite this intervention, however, the share markets continued to fall. And they fell not just in the United States but all around the world. Banks in many countries had to be bailed out by their governments. It seemed that the “toxic mortgages” that had started the problem had ended up being processed into various forms of “derivative” debt and exported all around the world. In addition, it turned out that the culture of lax bank regulation and incentivization of massive, unsustainable credit was not a particularly American problem but one shared and developed in concert with many other industrialized countries. So it was only when the world’s leaders allcame together, in meetings of the G7 and G20 countries (meetings of the leading industrialized counties), and developed integrated global solutions to a global problem, that the bleeding stopped and markets around the world begun to stabilize. At the end of 2008, it was not just America but all countries that faced bleak economic times ahead.
After both of these events, people said, “The world will never be the same again.” What they might rather have said: “The world has been changing rapidly for some time. These events have caused us to notice it.”
These events can be understood only if one takes a global perspective. These matters are not just about New York or about America or about the Middle East and its relationship with America or about finance in the developed world. The forces involved are economic, political, legal, and cultural forces that cross international boundaries, create international problems, and require international solutions. We all see these things, and whether we like it or not, we are all involved. We are all citizens in a global world. And none of us can escape the fact.

Forces of Globalization

We are all living increasingly global lives. And we are beginning to see and understand the importance of the process known as globalization, particularly the way it affects the lives of people. Globalization means an increase in the permeability of traditional boundaries, not just those around business organizations but those around countries, economies, industries, and people.2
Globalization has accelerated by a host of factors in the international business environment, including the following:
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Increased international interconnectedness, as represented by trade agreements, the growth of international trade, the growth of multinational corporations, and the ability to locate business, particularl...

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