Introduction
Culture: Those sets of values, language, religion, cuisine, social habits and norms, music, art, expected behavior, and measures of success. Most people tend to think in terms of national or regional culture, yet the reality is far more complex. In addition to regional subcultures, there are subcultures defined by profession, organizational position, political affiliation, ethnic group, sexual identity or preference, income, social status, social identity, and perhaps more importantly, age group. Adding to this complexity is the bias inherent in those belonging to a culture or subculture. The biased lenses with which we view others often complicate our understanding of their expectations, needs, and desires. The challenges of understanding various cultural identities when doing business in a global marketplace can, therefore, be exceedingly complicated. Cultural differences, after all, are often the root of miscommunication (Brownlee, 2020).
Challenges: Understanding and Appreciating in-House Cultural Differences
Where to start? The first challenge is understanding the cultural perceptions nearest the center of control. People often assume that those working in a position of management within the same company share the same cultural identity. While this may have been true in the middle of the twentieth century when company managers were more demographically and culturally homogeneous, we now live in an increasingly diverse environment, complicated by an apparent bias against those whose view of the world is different from our own. The increase in racial diversity alone can be seen by looking at the percentages of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and other racial groups within each age group in Table 1.1.
Table 1.1
Racial distribution by generation
Years | Generation | Study | White (%) | Black (%) | Hispanic (%) | Asian (%) | Other (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1946–1964 | Baby Boomer | 1969 | 82 | 13 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
1965–1980 | Generation X | 1987 | 70 | 15 | 12 | <1 | 3 |
1981–1996 | Millennial | 2003 | 61 | 15 | 17 | 4 | 3 |
1997–2012 | Generation Z | 2019 | 52 | 14 | 25 | 6 | 5 |
While only 6% of Generation Z (Gen Z) in the U.S. are immigrants, they are more likely to be the children of immigrants, with 22% of them having at least one immigrant parent. The Gen Z population is predicted to become the majority nonwhite population by 2026. Gen Z workers are also more likely to support gender neutral or gender flexible perspectives, with nearly 60% indicating profiles should include more than male and female gender options. Although the perspectives of Millennial and Gen Z workers are very similar, they are vastly different than those of the Baby Boomers, and these differences and biases can create management issues unrelated to the work performed on the jobsite.
The second challenge is understanding that diversity and cultural biases can lead to significant issues for distant and local marketplaces in how we treat the perspectives of others and how we expect them to react to our actions and communications. Senior managers are often the victims of confirmation bias when they treat silence to their opinions as confirmation of their perspective, when it is often simply a desire not to express a different opinion. This is particularly true when senior managers make comments that go unchallenged by the younger or distant workforce, yet create a potentially hostile work environment that leads to decreased performance and high employee turnover.
The third challenge is recognizing generational differences in perception, expectations, and measures of success. Baby boomers tend to project their work ethic on those they supervise, not realizing that generational differences alone suggest doing so can create discord in the workplace. Baby-boomers (1946-1964), for example, believe hard work and company loyalty will lead to success because they came of age when that was the societal paradigm. Gen X (1965-1980), Millennial (1981-1996), and Gen Z (1997-2012) workers, however, came of age with a different economic reality (Beheshti, 2018). Millennials and Gen Z workers grew up and are growing up in a time of increased technological change, where social media is a common venue for communicating and sharing experiences. As such, they prefer email and texting to phone calls and value flexibility in work arrangements, especially where they can work remotely. This is due to the fact they cannot count on a single employer to shape, structure, or advance their career, nor be sure of the geographical location of their next employer. Their perspective is important to the baby boomers who represent the current core of upper management, since projections suggest Millennials and Gen Z workers will represent 75% of the global workforce by 2025 (Beheshti, 2018). The willingness and capability of these groups working from remote locations were shown to be an advantage to businesses who employed these workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. While baby boomers perhaps struggled with the technology required to work from home, millennials and Gen Z workers quickly adapted to the new normal because they have been raised on the technology and for them it is second nature. However, the economic perspective of Millennials and Gen Z workers differs. Whereas Millennials grew up during a period of recession, the oldest of the Gen Z workers in the U.S. came of age in a strong economy with record low unemployment. This all changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where Gen Z workers were hard hit in the early months of the pandemic. A March 2020 Per Research Center survey found that 50% of the Gen Z workers in the 18-23-year-old age group reported that either they or someone in their household had either lost their job or took a pay cut due to the shutdown resulting from the pandemic. This percentage was higher than the 40% of Millennials, 36% of Gen Xers, and 25% of the Baby Boomers. Gen Z workers tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse, while being the most well-educated group. Gen Z workers are digital natives who, like their millennial counterparts, are progressive, pro-government, and less likely to see the U.S. as being superior to other nations (Parker & Igielnik, 2020).
As open-minded and adaptable to change Millennial and Gen Z workers may be, they are just as likely to be subject to the same biases as their predecessors. Specifically, those who belong to the same age demographic tend to believe they share the same values with others of the same age. This is a misconception, especially when viewed from a global perspective with political, geographical, religious, ethnic, or sexual preferential differences are nuanced by culture. So, how does a manager deal with such a variety of perspectives, expectations, work ethics, and measures of success? They must first establish their own corporate culture that is sufficiently flexible as to not alienate any group, while being focused on the company’s goals.
The fourth challenge is the creation of a company culture that accommodates a broad spectrum of differences resulting from increased diversity. Companies cannot change personal preferences or perspectives, yet they can establish organizational expectations that set a common goal. Understanding the cultural perspective of their employees certainly allows them to tailor how they avoid cultural faux pas while establishing corporate goals and measures of success that serve to focus work processes, so the business environment does not adversely impact the cultural expectations of the workers. Creating an environment where employees are unafraid to voice their ideas or issues requires active listening and a willingness to appreciate diversity of opinion and perspective. This does not mean managers must treat everyone differently based on their cultural expectations; it simply means they must take those differences as acceptable variations while treating everyone equally, regardless of their cultural alignment.
Next Steps
Once an organization has put its own house in order, the next step is to identify cultural issues in their satellite venues and address them in similar fashion. This is not always as easy as it may sound because the degree of cultural acceptance in some areas of the world is drastically more inflexible than in others. Dress codes of the West are often unacceptable to those in the Middle East, as too are cultural norms of the society at large. It is, therefore, critical that organizational leaders understand the baseline culture of populations socially and geographically distant from their own. Once that baseline is understood, the next steps would be to identify the relative subcultures that exist within that venue and work within the limits set by society in that location.
These efforts will take time, which may not always be available. It will often be necessary, therefore, to identify key people in the distant location that better understand the expectations of the local workers and express the company’s expectations to them so they can translate those expectations into actions that align the distant venue’s values to the company’s goals and measures of success. Globalization requires accommodation, rather than institutionalization. History shows that populations with very different cultures, goals, and measures of success can often work together toward a common goal. It is, therefore, paramount that the goal be articulated in such a way as to bring different parts of the organization together without attempting to make all the parts look and act the same.
Understanding the organizational workers and stakeholders is the first step in understanding the global marketplace (Gabel-Shemueli, Westman, Chen, & Bahamonde, 2019). Trying to sell miniskirts in Saudi Arabia might sound like a good idea if the only consideration is the lack of miniskirts in Saudi Arabia. However, understanding the culture and social norms of that society should make a company realize that attempts to sell miniskirts in that area would prove disastrous, not only in a lack of sales, but by creating a negative image of the company attempting to market such an item in their society. Social taboos, associations with words or concepts, can either enhance the marketability of products and the company’s image, or do just the opposite. It is, therefore, important to consider hiring local managers or cultural experts that can educate the home workforce on the cultural nuances of the target marketplace, workplace, or production site. These individuals can mentor those employees who must interface with or visit the host country, ensuring such engagements work to the company’s advantage by avoiding cultural faux pas or insults. By the same token, using local managers instead of importing home country employees serves the dual purpose of ensuring effective communication between supervisors and employees in the host location, plus avoiding cultural clashes that might exist while the imported employee is gaining an in-depth understanding of the host country’s culture.
Reality and Perception: Subjective Vs Objective
Objective reality does not exist as far as human perception is concerned (Fedrizzi & Proietti, 2019). We live in a subjective reality, where what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, or think is the product of our entire life experiences. These experiences create biases that further distort our view of reality. If someone in California sees a picture of a woman in a bikini, their perception of that person is vastly different than someone viewing the same picture who lives in a more modest culture. Social experiments also show we have a color bias, not just skin color, but a basic bias toward or against certain colors for clothing, signs, buildings, and a host of other objects. One study showed more people assisted a woman asking for directions on a busy street when she wore a red dress than when she wore a white dress. This bias, however, would only be true for the people in that area of that country. Another study showed those in the U.S. have a bias toward yellow and red for fast food signs. The study revealed this bias is due to the association of mustard and ketchup with the notion of fast foods. These studies clearly show we have an unconscious bias toward color.
Other studies have shown similar biases based on the style of clothing and the association of images and sound. The Stroop effect, for example, is where we find ourselves challenged to state the color of a word that does not match the word, for example, the word “red” in “green” text. Our brains seek logical alignment and are confused or frustrated when such alignment does not exist. This can be an issue when translating advertisements into a foreign language, especially if certain colors do not evoke the same connections. This is especially true in the Lev Kuleshov effect, where associations between images change the way the imag...