Culture and Management in the Americas

Alfredo Behrens

• Publisher: Stanford Business Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780804760140
• eBook ISBN: 9780804771146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Latin Americans are culturally different from North Americans in ways that so far have been inaccurately portrayed in the management literature. In Culture and Management in the Americas, Alfredo Behrens argues that these differences merit a substantial overhaul of management theory and practice to make the best of the significantly untapped Latin American potential for creativity, innovation, and teamwork. This applies in organizations with North American ownership and management, whether they are based in the U.S. or Latin America.

Behrens, a management consultant and academic who has studied, taught, and practiced in South and North America and Europe, explains why the use of traditional North American research methods to capture cultural traits in the multi-cultural workforce is inappropriate. This practice produces a false picture of the cultural attributes and capabilities of Latin American managers and key staff. And this, in turn, leads to serious shortcomings in the development of appropriate motivation and leadership strategies and of appraisal and control instruments.

Rather than relying on standardized surveys for measuring cultural attributes to underpin and develop such strategies and tools, the author suggests that managers look to the arts—particularly literature and cinema—for a richer and more useful alternative. He illustrates his points by reference to literary icons such as Argentina's Martin Fierro, Brazil's Macunaima, and America's Captain Ahab. He uses a variety of case studies to demonstrate what we can learn from these iconographic characters and what we can expect of each other when we apply these lessons—whether we are leading, following, or working in self-directed teams. This readable and enjoyable book will be an invaluable, engaging, and practical tool for anyone charged with managing at any level in workforce that combines both North American and Latin American cultures.

PART ONE

CULTURE AND THE AMERICAS

THIS SECTION INTRODUCES THE focal issue of this book, suggesting that effective management depends on attuning its instruments to the culture of the people it purports to manage. However, the focus of this part is to level the ground, introducing concepts such as culture and stereotypes, the meaning and extent of the concept “Latin America,” and the role of Iberian Catholicism in the formation of the Latin American mind.

CHAPTER 1

THE DAVOS MAN OR THE GAUCHO?

I invent nothing, I rediscover.

Auguste Rodin, 1840–1917

MUCH TO THE DISMAY of the Davos Man, modernization does not necessarily mean adopting the Davos culture. More often than not, modernization means a return to indigenous values, as in Bolivia’s Evo Morales, or the popular appeal of Peru’s Ollanta Humala. Such is also the case with Islam and Asian values. The Davos Man, powerfully connected as he is, is not the spearhead of evolution. He is merely a slim developmental option, and not necessarily the one with the greatest chance of success in Latin America.

In Latin America one has seen, at the outset of this millennium, the back lash against globalization. The populations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela, for example, elected governments more attuned with local values than with international ones.

WHAT IS CULTURE?

By culture, some people may refer to the more or less tangible manifestations of a place—such as its art, literature, architecture, music—and its folk culture. To political scientists, culture means the values, attitudes, orientations, philosophy, and weltanschauung of a people. To anthropologists, culture has a much broader sense and comprehends all of the above plus the symbols and way of life of a society, its family and social structures, its functional stratification, and the institutions it operates through.

Furthermore, culture is not static, it is the expression of interference, dialogue, and negotiation. Culture is used and produced; it flows. National identity is not static; it is grounded in everyday life. Yet there are limits: its evolution is slow.

Clifford Geertz, the renowned cultural anthropologist, refers to culture as a web, for it tenuously surrounds people, conveying the limits of the acceptable. But a web recalls a spider, thus the web is threatening because it is spun by a purposeful living creature with the aim of trapping us. Consider this Geertz-like web definition of culture: “Culture [means] an organized body of rules concerning the ways in which individuals in a population should communicate with one another, think about themselves and their environments, and behave toward one another and toward objects in their environments.”¹ The definitions are many, partly because culture is difficult to apprehend. One feels culture rather than sees it; and, notably, one feels it only through the contrast of different cultures. Someone who is born and raised in a single culture without exposure to any other is unlikely to develop the concept of culture.

Culture also is expressed in the attitudes of a people. People can be more easily assertive in cultures where individuals are expected to clearly say what they want—such as American Donald Trump refusing to accept a small tree as a token of appreciation from the city of New York for his contributions to charities. The tree, Trump said, would not adequately reflect his demeanor; he wanted a sequoia instead, the tree that grows to be the highest in the world.

Culture also rules in the background, such as through moral stances that render some peoples more prone to guilt and others to shame. Individualist cultures tend to be more guilt ridden, while in collectivist cultures, shame has a higher guiding prominence.² Among the former, individuals are expected to be responsible for their actions, and they tend to feel guilty only for wrongdoing that they have direct control over. They suffer no more liability than that. On the other hand, in collectivist countries, where “face” is more important, an individual feels shame even for liabilities not under his or her control, such as congenital physical impairments.³

Literature carries messages that shape us, as do our parents and schooling systems, and as do our friends, through interaction. We gradually learn how to work, what to work for, and what to respect, including other people’s property. When we do not respect it, we meet with the sticky side of the Geertz web; we are entrapped. The judicial system, with its laws and enforcement, as well as its eventual inefficacy, is a manifestation of our culture, like our art and our buildings. Those are the visible expressions of our culture.

STEREOTYPES, THE CULTURAL SHORTCUT

Once we become aware of different cultures, we try to apprehend their constellations of expressions through stereotypes. Despite their negative connotations, cultural stereotypes have a place in social interaction. They help us fit scant and fragmented information into a jigsaw puzzle that we can draw sense from. Structuring information within a stereotype is no different from the generic process of cognition.

Stereotypes are useful as long as we are flexible and willing to accept that the facts can be at odds with the stereotype, and we must also be willing to adapt the stereotype to the new information. Stereotyping may be a lazy way of proceeding, but it is painfully real. Moreover, stereotypes may guide behavior, even in the wrong direction. To this effect, it is useful to illustrate with the case of New York’s Mad Bomber.

The Mad Bomber scare resulted from a series of bombs that exploded in public places in New York during 1956 and 1957.⁴ The type of bomb and associated details led analysts to identify a “signature” in the bombings, and it was assumed that one individual was responsible. A lengthy opinion survey was conducted, revealing that most people believed the Mad Bomber to be a white male. Many readily offered explanations like “only men are intelligent, bold, and nervy enough.” Upper-class and female respondents, in contrast, would more readily finger women as the Mad Bomber, offering explanations like “women can be stupid and dangerous.” Most believed that the Mad Bomber was an atheist because of the consensus that a religious person would not be able to do what the bomber was doing. Some respondents asserted that the Mad Bomber was a Protestant because his plot was directed against the majority of the New York population: Catholics and Jews.

Other responses suggested that, in the case of a prolonged threat without apparent cause, the population could resort to prejudice and project motives of the transgression onto specific subgroups. This was apparent with regards to religion as well as to nationality. Germans and Italians tended to see the Mad Bomber as Russian; some Russians and Italians tended to see him as German, while most Russians tended to see him as Italian. Explanations to justify assigning one nationality over others suggested that the Mad Bomber would be Russian because “Russians and communists are nonbelievers in God and they throw bombs.” The alleged ferocity of Poles was enough to attribute that nationality to the Mad Bomber, and Italians were also targeted because “Italians are hotheaded.” A few believed that the Mad Bomber might be Egyptian and attributed their choice to the “Egyptian sneakiness.”⁵

CULTURE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: WHICH LATIN AMERICA?

The Latin America tag—and its implicit us-them dichotomy—may be a nineteenth-century European misnomer, and it hides an even greater misconception: the so-called Latin countries are not all alike. Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay show scant precolonial underpinnings. Paraguay is sometimes thrown into this Southern Cone for reasons of being part of an agricultural economy extending along the Paraná River. Paraguay differs from the other three countries mainly due to its strong indigenous population. Perhaps southern Brazil could be added to this cultural group as well. That region of Brazil belongs to the same river basin, with similar weather and agricultural orientation and similar traditions—not least among them the habit of sipping yerba maté—and a stronger European immigration background than is found in the rest of Brazil.

We also have the mainly Andean countries where the pre-Columbian cultures still have a significant impact: Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Mexico is also a country with a strong indigenous heritage, besides a two-thousand-mile shared border with the USA, which certainly subjects it to an interesting but different cultural symbiosis. Puerto Rico is another stand-alone country, part of the old Spanish empire, yes, but under American tutelage for a century now. Neighboring Cuba is part of Latin America, of course, but after narrowly escaping Puerto Rico’s fate, it succumbed to another relatively alien regime. Then we have Colombia and Venezuela, which were one nation until 1830; they are different, yes, but similar in values, particularly among their coastal populations. Then, of course, we have Brazil, separated from the rest by jungles, language, and a particular blend of nationalities, among which the presence of the African Negro is substantial. This historical and economic clustering is strong enough to register statistically, as argued by Lenartowicz and Johnson.⁶ The former Guianas and Belize are largely overlooked by all, encrusted in the region as evidence of former colonial rivalries, which also color the Caribbean.

It no longer suffices to argue that Latin America is a “tenable hypothesis,” justifying the lumping of all countries into one cluster. When it comes to culture and management, the various nations may be different enough to deserve specific research, which needs to be developed. The purpose of this book is not to recommend management techniques for all of the regions but to reveal that the cultural differences may be large enough to merit research specific to each culture. In that sense, it suffices to focus more deeply on two Latin American countries in order to illustrate the point. The United States, Argentina, and Brazil are the focus of this book, and when Latin or South America is mentioned, it is not with the intent of arguing that the same comments apply to all countries but rather to remind the reader of the breadth of the argument: management must be congruent with people’s vital beliefs in order to be effective.

CULTURAL TIDES: HOW DID THESE PLACES COME INTO BEING?

The Americas are lands with many cultures. In the North, national unity was brought about under the hegemony of the predominant culture, that of the original British settlers. Waves of subsequent immigrants were woven into this culture, which evolved in response to the immigrants. This is why we now can distinguish a “Brit” from a “Yankee,” especially when we hear them speak English.

Still, the predominance of the English language, from whatever source, as a main element of the North American culture today implies a European heritage that brought with it the Christian religion and mostly Protestant values. These values were crystallized in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which express the underlying values of equality, liberty, individualism, rule of law, entrepreneurship, and democracy.

In the case of much of Latin America, the Iberian settlers and local indigenous peoples initially formed the predominant culture. Indigenous peoples were found more densely in today’s Mexico and Central America, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. To these cultures were added those of Africa (during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) and southern Europe (during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), very much as happened in the United States. Some Asian peoples settled along the Pacific coast, mainly Chinese in Peru. On the Atlantic shore, Brazil absorbed a large influx of Japanese immigrants in the early twentieth century that settled mostly in the Southeast, creating the largest Japanese community outside of Japan.

Africans were enslaved and drawn to the Americas from the western coast of Sub-Saharan Africa to the southern United States and eastern South America, particularly Brazil, where they were settled from the Northeast down to the Southeast of Brazil in such high numbers that, according to one prominent historian, Luis Felipe de Alencastro, Brazil could not have existed without Africa, particularly Angola. The emphasis placed on Brazil’s Atlantic coast—given both the slave trade and the export of sugar to Europe—means that Brazil was less integrated with the rest of Latin America than it was with Africa.⁷

Beyond headcount and geographical origins, the values transferred by a people to their new home are crucial in defining the resulting culture. Shared values and attitudes act as tangible manifestations of culture, and this common understanding allows us to know what to expect of another person—as regards, for instance, respect for the order of arrival in the forming of lines.

An acceptable level of trust is also a cultural manifestation that varies from culture to culture. In some cultures, people trust more readily than in others. There may be good reasons for this, as seen in the expression “once bitten, twice shy.” Societies with poor law enforcement enable wrongdoers to get away with malfeasance more frequently. The lower risk associated with the penalty may prompt individuals to take advantage of others; accordingly, the proverb “opportunity makes the thief ” (occasio facit furem) dates back to Roman times, as does “believe in no human” (ne humanus crede). A lower threshold of trust makes business transactions more guarded, adding unnecessary attrition to business and to company growth. One may seriously wonder whether such lack of trust eventually led to the demise of the Roman empire and subsequently flowed into Latin America through its immigrants, mostly southern European Catholics.

Culture also impacts organizations, including the business world. The values of a culture thus influence the way business is conducted, from small business transactions to industrial corporations. Interpersonal trust is an important element of values and attitudes and, as an expression of culture, varies much among countries. Francis Fukuyama has argued that where the scope of trust is broad, such as in the United States, Germany, and Japan, countries are more able to develop large-scale organizations; whereas in countries with a narrower scope of trust, the size of corporations is likewise limited, and these remain largely family owned, as in Italy, France, and Spain as well as in the locations where those populations have migrated to, such as Brazil and Argentina.

Cultures frequently crystallize their messages in sayings or proverbs like those in the previous examples. Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism, “time is money,” is a cultural expression that speaks directly to the Protestant work ethic, wherein idle time is better spent productively and—by implication—to fulfill the Lord’s mandate. This particular sentiment is unlikely to fit as well in Catholic environments, where work is not as readily identified with devotion to the Lord. Such ap...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• WHO SHOULD READ WHAT IN THIS BOOK
• INTRODUCTION - COUNTRIES OF THE FUTURE, FOREVER?
• PART ONE - CULTURE AND THE AMERICAS
• PART TWO - CULTURAL TRIBUTARIES OF THE NEW WORLD
• PART THREE - CULTURES OF THE NEW WORLD
• PART FOUR - CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT: THE TOOLBOX
• PART FIVE - MEASURING THE IMPACT OF CULTURE ON MANAGEMENT
• NOTES
• INDEX