Cross-Cultural Management

Foundations and Future

Dean Tjosvold, Kwok Leung, Kwok Leung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351947237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

Academics worldwide need empirically developed, concise ideas to make their cross-cultural teams and organizations productive. This invaluable reference tool provides an essential resource for academics to develop their understanding and professional practice in working across cultural boundaries. It considers the fundamental theories and frameworks of cross-cultural management and deepens our understanding of how they can be applied to management knowledge. Managers, researchers, students, HRM practitioners, and specialists in international business and cross-cultural affairs, will find this book a valuable reference source. Chapters suggest how frameworks can be further developed and how managers and employees can put them to use so as to build cross-cultural understanding and productive cross-functional teams.

Chapter 1
Forty-Five Years of Researching the Culture and Behavior Link: An Intellectual Autobiography

Harry C. Triandis

Since Bond has published my autobiography (Triandis, 1997) I will focus here on the intellectual aspects of my life. I will start by discussing how I got involved in the analysis of subjective culture. Then I will discuss studies about how to deal with diversity, especially in the workplace. Then, I will mention the development of two handbooks. Next, I will discuss my work on individualism and collectivism. Finally, I will make some general observations about my career.

I am a strong believer in multiple perspectives. Each culture is a worldview; its members look at reality somewhat differently from the way members of other cultures do. This view hit me when I was growing up in Greece, where in addition to Greek, I learned French, German, Italian, and English. I was fascinated by the differences I noted among the speakers of these languages.

When I went to Canada to study I was able to observe these differences even better. For example, my fellow students were not as close to their parents as I was, an attribute that I learned later differentiates many collectivist from individualist cultures (Triandis, 1995). Many of my Canadian fellow students did not feel embarrassed about discussing negative aspects of their family life with me, whereas I would have been embarrassed to do so. I found them very easy to meet, yet there were many aspects of their personal life that they did not want to talk about. By contrast, Greek fellow students were more difficult to meet, but if one became their friend, they discussed many aspects of their personal life. It is as if, in individualist cultures, family life is an open book, but personal life is private, while in collectivist cultures personal life is not private within the ingroup, but family life is private when interacting with out-groups. It took many years before I did actually measured these tendencies (Triandis, 1995).

My life as a psychologist has always been a mixture of applied and theoretical perspectives. I never thought of myself as an applied psychologist only, though I have been associated with the International Association of Applied Psychology since 1961, and was its President from 1990-94. Much of the work I did on cultural patterns, such as the analysis of subjective culture (Triandis, 1972), and on individualism and collectivism can be seen as theoretical, but it had definite applications, such as to cross-cultural training (Triandis, 1994, Chapter 10).

I think that most of the time I started from an applied problem, and to understand the phenomena that underlie it I had to develop theory. For example, in the 1960s, Admiral Zum wait, who was Chief of Naval Operations, wanted to make “every sailor an ambassador.” This is perfectly understandable, since the USA had bases all over the world, and the sailors frequently did not behave correctly from the perspectives of the host countries. Thus, in 1962 a group of us in Illinois received funding from the Navy to study how to make every sailor an ambassador – a practical problem. The problem was divided into four parts: I was to identify ways to study cultures. Fred Fiedler was to study how leadership might be used in making each sailor an ambassador. Charles Osgood was to study how communication might be used for that purpose; Larry Stolurow was to study how the information generated by the other members of the team could be converted to training programs for the sailors.

This generated the idea of culture assimilators – training materials that consist of critical incidents followed by four or five explanations about why a behavior described in the incident is “correct” or “wrong” from the point of view of the host culture. After a sailor picks one of the explanations as the potentially correct one, feedback is given concerning whether the explanation is correct or incorrect. If correct, a paragraph or more of cultural information about the similarities and differences between US-mainstream culture and the host culture provides some insight about the differences between the cultures. After a sailor has worked through 100 such episodes, he has a fairly good understanding of the major differences between his culture and the other culture. Validation of these assimilators (Fiedler, Mitchell, and Triandis, 1971) provided encouraging results. For example, those who have been trained feel more relaxed about their assignment abroad (Mitchell, Dossett, Fiedler, and Triandis, 1972). However, problems do arise (Weldon, Carlston, Rissman, Slobodin, and Triandis, 1975). For instance, those who get trained sometimes “freeze” when they interact with members of other cultures, because they are too worried that they will make mistakes. Nevertheless, the culture assimilator has become a standard method of cross-cultural training (Brislin and Bhawuk, 1999). It has been shown to increase the making of ‘isomorphic attributions’ (Triandis, 1975), where the trainee learns to use similar attributions, and thus assign the same meaning to a behavior, that members of the host culture give to that behavior.

In short, my task in that project was to find out how to analyze cultures. This resulted in the analysis of subjective culture (Triandis, 1972).

Analysis of Subjective Culture

People in each culture have characteristic ways of viewing the human-made part of the environment. That is what we call their “subjective culture.” The ideas, theories, the political, religious, scientific, aesthetic, economic, and social standards for judging events in the environment are human-made and shape the way people view their environment. To analyze their subjective culture, the first step was to identify key terms that are used frequently in the host culture, and do not have a monoleximic (single word) equivalent in other cultures. In short, the task is to discover the culture-specific (emic) ways of cutting the pie of experience. In other words, How do people categorize experience in each culture?

Since I knew most about Greece, I did most of the work in Greece, but I also worked with colleagues in India and Japan (Triandis, 1972). For example, a key term in Greece is “philotimo.” This literally means “love of honor.” However, it really means “I act as members of my ingroup expect me to act.” This idea is very collectivist. Greece in the 1960s was collectivist, and the differences in behavior toward members of the ingroup and outgroup were striking.

In Greece I collaborated with Vasso Vassiliou, who was making marketing surveys. She used representative samples of the two largest cities (almost half the population of the country). In such surveys she slipped-in questions for the analysis of subjective culture. For example, when asked, “what are you like?” Greeks were very likely to say that they were “philotimos.” But the probability of giving that response was very high if they were recent arrivals from the provinces, i.e. had a rural background. The longer they had lived in the cities the less likely they were to give that response (Vassiliou and Vassiliou, 1966; Vassiliou and Vassiliou, 1973). Later we learned that collectivism was generally higher in rural than in urban settings, except when the urban settings had ethnic neighborhoods as is often the case in the USA (Vandello and Cohen, 1999). Ethnic neighborhoods are collectivist.

Another way to talk about the first step in the analysis of subjective culture is to discuss categorization. All humans categorize. But the categories that they use are not always similar. For example, even when a simple term like “red” is used, what members of one culture call “red” is not identical to what members of other cultures call “red” (Triandis, 1964a). It is true that the focal red is more or less the same, but the boundaries of what is red are not. In fact, there are cultures that do not even have a word for red. Such cultures have only words for white and black. However, if a culture has a color word then red is likely to be it. More complex color names can be found, as cultures have more and more words for colors. Thus, Berlin and Kay (1969) showed that there is a progression from red, to yellow-green, then to both yellow and green, and then to blue, brown, and finally purple, pink, orange, and gray. If simple color names do not have identical meanings across cultures, imagine what happens to more complex words like “democracy!”

One of the ways to study a category is to find instances of the category and ask people in the culture whether the instance belongs or does not belong to the category. For instance, “Is the regime in Nigeria a democracy?” Another way to study the category is to use the antecedent-consequent meaning method (Triandis, 1972, Chapter 7). Participants are asked to complete sentences of the form “If you have __, then you have democracy DEMOCRACY” and “If you have DEMOCRACY, then you have __”. You take the responses that are most frequently given by members of different cultures and present them with the above mentioned antecedents and consequents in a multiple choice format. In that study we used one antecedent that was common across our samples (etic) and one emic antecedent from Greece, India, Japan, and the USA. We then looked at the frequencies with which our samples from these cultures selected the various antecedents. We did the same for the consequents. That study produced an enormous body of information (20 concepts had 30 antecedents and 30 consequents, i.e. 1200 “findings”).

Data of that kind can be used to corroborate hunches one has about a particular culture. The key idea is convergence. One does not believe any one cultural difference. It is only when several differences converge that one begins to pay attention to them. The particular data were used by Hofstede (1980, 2001), to support his findings on individualism and collectivism.

In addition to studying the meaning of key terms, that study examined stereotypes, values, role perceptions, and the meaning of social behaviors. Triandis (1972, Chapter 9) compared Greek and American cultures. “Reality in Greece is impregnated with social considerations, whereas in America it is focused on the individual.” (p. 299). Traditional Greek social behavior depends on whether the other person is a member of the ingroup or of the outgroup. Greeks obey ingroup authorities and undermine outgroup authorities.

Stereotypes can be used as estimates of cultural differences, because when two cultures are different on some attribute the greater the difference the more likely it is that both the autostereotypes (e.g., how Greeks see Greeks) and the heterostereotypes (e.g., how Americans see Greeks) will reflect that difference. When the auto- and hetero-stereotypes agree there is reason to think that a real difference is present. For instance, Americans saw Greeks as “inefficient,” and Greeks saw Americans as “efficient.” Furthermore, Greeks saw Greeks as “inefficient.” Then, the probability is high that there is a cultural difference on “efficiency.” Americans perceived Greeks as “suspicious” which makes sense when one considers that Greeks treat outgroups differently from ingroups.

An examination of the geography and history of Greece was used to explain the emergence of the particular Greek subjective culture. Role perceptions reflected cultural differences in the way people act toward ingroup and outgroup members. For example, Greeks were very positive and intimate in ingroup roles (e.g., father-son), but not in outgroup roles (landlord-tenant), while Americans were relatively positive in outgroup roles.

Greeks (relative to Americans) were oversensitive to criticism, and tended to blame their own mistakes on others. This is the kind of information that is most useful for supervisors of Greeks, and can be used in cross-cultural training.

The chapter argued that the principle of “fairness” is equivalent to the principle of “philotimo.” In America people try to be fair to others, but the more similar the other person is in beliefs, race, religion, and social class, the more does a person try to be fair. In traditional Greece one is philotimos when dealing with ingroup members, but in dealing with outgroup members it is perfectly okay to be aphilotimos (the opposite, e.g., to cheat). The American ingroup is large; the Greek ingroup is small (family, friends, friendly guests, and people who are concerned with my welfare).

Misunderstandings across cultures occur when people give different meaning to social behavior. The associations of specific social behaviors give clues to such misunderstandings. For instance “to advise” is seen as closely linked to “gives love” in Greece, but not so much in the USA. ‘To enjoy working for” is a very positive emotion in Greece, which implies going out of your way to help, support, stand for, etc. It is not so positive in the USA. But to enjoy working for the traditional Greek needs a supervisor who will treat him like a father, will be responsive to his special needs, and so on. ‘To invite to dinner” Greeks see as more formal than do Americans.

This type of work was later done with African-Americans (Triandis, 1976b), and Hispanic-Americans (Triandis, Marin, Lisansky, and Betancourt, 1984). For instance, we found that African-Americans who had never had a job were very different from African-Americans with jobs. The former tended to distrust their social environment. We called this “ecosystem distrust.” Hispanics tend to see social behavior as being more positive and less negative than is true for European-Am...