Culture Shock of the American Environment - Case Study Example

Culture Shock of the American Environment Task A The main character, Akunna, maintained a type of culture shock when the reality of the American environment differed significantly from her expectations. Her basic belief was that in America she would achieve rapid wealth and instant success, but found, instead, that she was exploited (in the business world) and that many in the local American culture had very false impressions of the Nigerian culture. They maintained many stereotypes about African natives which caused her emotional distress in which she used a type of coping strategy referred to as distancing to distract herself from succumbing to the negative emotions this was causing. These same frustrations manifested in her romantic relationship, where she found a misguided type of smugness and self-gratification when her partner described how others should behave and illustrated an erroneous type of empathy toward Akunna’s experiences in America and Nigeria. She was far less judgmental toward others in the social environment where her partner was condemnatory to others that did not behave according to his own conceptions of appropriate social attitude and behaviour. She saw the gifts she received as being irrational and wasteful, but gained emotional intelligence through these experiences which tends to underpin an ability to be a more effective cultural participant (Rockstuhl, 2011); with the capability of controlling her frustrations and aggravation. Unfortunately, extended contact with locals did not underpin the reduction of anxiety about how to relate to these individuals, as indicated by Kim and van Dyne (2012). Instead, the vanity-centric prejudices in America, quite different than a more collectivist Nigerian culture, only exacerbated her frustration and desire to return to her more comfortable home culture, which she ultimately did. Her levels of cultural intelligence, the ability to effectively relate to the American culture and work effectively with them (Alon and Higgins, 2005), improved through recurring social interactions, however she had difficulty rectifying this within her own cultural framework to achieve positive social belonging and tolerance of the highly-different American culture. For example, her romantic partner had an indifferent relationship with his family where familial bonds were underpinned by reward exchanges that founded a sense of love, quite different than Akunna’s own family relationships that were tighter and more mutual. She seemed to find this relationship disturbing and resented how she, herself, was excluded from further family activities as a result of this indifference. In America, in her experience with her uncle, he believed that Akunna should succumb to his sexual advances if she wanted to succeed in America. Her uncle was from Nigeria also which might underpin that familial sexual relationships, in this African culture, were common and that women should comply with such advances. However, her initial belief that America was a land of opportunity bolstered her decision to venture out on her own and not succumb to her uncle’s sexual perversion. At this point, she maintained little cultural intelligence and was seeking an independent, prosperous future founded on these misconceptions, which were shattered when offered a job at a lower wage than American waitresses. Templer, Tay and Chandrasekar (2006) suggest that cultural intelligence predicted the ability to adjust, however her limited knowledge of the reality of seeking wealth and success in America complicated cultural adjustment. If she had agreed to her uncle’s advances, it would have (at that time) destroyed her expectations about the American Dream which could have maintained significant, negative emotional responses about her impression of American living. It seemed as though Americans were comfortable with their stereotypical image of Nigerian culture and were rather proud of their misguided levels of knowledge. They believed that Akunna ate wild animals and that Akunna likely had never seen a car before coming to the United States. Americans maintained little cross-cultural competency nor did they seem interested in rectifying these misconceptions. Akunna was, therefore, forced to simply smile at these cultural misgivings even though she seemed emotionally disturbed by American’s continuing ignorance and arrogance in how they viewed Nigerian culture. Lack of tangible experience and education about foreign cultures underpins inability to successfully interact with another culture (Earley and Peterson, 2004). It was clear with Akunna’s simple coping strategies and using behaviours that would avoid conflict and potentially save face with Americans did not speak toward positive social adjustment, but instead was just a strategy to distract her from the complex aggravations that American culture was causing her. Americans clearly wanted to exert their power in the form of cultural stereotyping, a type of power distance described by Browaeys and Price (2004), which made Akunna least powerful in American society. An interesting experience was when Akunna was at a Chinese restaurant and the waiter would not believe that Akunna and her romantic partner could possibly be a couple. This reinforced a type of stereotyping in American culture built on vanity and narcissism, with Akunna have more nappy hair typical of an African while her partner had blonde hair. This made Akunna uncomfortable and irritated which underpinned less ability to adjust, long-term, to American cultural stereotypes. This reduced her motivation to adjust and interact with Americans as the outcome of cultural intelligence could not be reconciled with her strong cultural beliefs, a phenomenon identified by Staw (2002) as being founded on major incongruence of host culture and foreign culture attributes. Ward and Bochner (2001) assert that people feel more positive in a social context when they socialize with those having salient characteristics to themselves, and Akunna could not find this cultural congruency. Nebreda (2012) supports this, saying that such culture shock often makes the sufferer bottle up their emotions, something Akunna did regularly. Akunna’s inability to find belonging and reconcile these dramatic cultural differences was exacerbated by lack of legitimate social support and understanding from the host culture natives, something important for cultural adjustment (Pantelidou and Craig, 2006; Pandey and Bhawuk, 1996). In fact, Dolby (2004) asserts that social influence assists in helping a person find a sense of social identity and more experience and interaction with another culture underpins this development. Akunna did, indeed, refer to these social attitudes and misconceptions (as well as arrogance) to build her sense of identity, as a person disparate from American culture and basically longing to return to her home culture built on the annoyance and disappointment about how she perceived deficiencies in this new foreign culture. What was most interesting is that Akunna, though having built much stronger cultural intelligence, could not effectively apply these lessons to become an integrated part of this foreign culture. She learned about the indifference and comfortableness with lack of cross-cultural competency, but could not shed her own precepts about what constituted appropriate family-oriented, romance-centric and general social behaviour. There was such a radical difference in American culture from that of what underpinned her social development in Nigeria and she found self-righteousness at virtually every turn, with little social remorse for this conceit and lack of cultural foresight. She found Americans to be self-important, over-bearing and unwilling to change these basic, inherent cultural attitudes. When she received an opportunity to return to Nigeria, after learning about her father’s death, it was clear that she had no intention of returning. Though she could rectify her emotions, through emotional intelligence, it was not sufficient for becoming a full-fledged member of American society who would be comfortable with these vast cultural disparities between her and native locals. Akunna, too, was not perfect in how she viewed society, with an unbiased and impartial lens. She was highly ethnocentric, involving judging others based on the values and beliefs of one’s own culture with the attitude that it was superior and better quality than another culture (Salter, 2002). There were times where her romantic partner (as one example) tried to show his best effort at giving Akunna compassion, love and respect, but the specific method by which he went about this was annoying to Akunna. The case study described how Akunna’s family was close-knit and the dynamics of this close familial relationship. However, her boyfriend utilised discourse that Akunna found aggravating and not legitimately altruistic even though it seemed his intentions were good. She continued to hold onto the Nigerian values on which her social and cultural perceptions were founded and used this as a basis to judge the integrity, honesty and practicality of American-based empathy and compassion. This was a bit unfair for Akunna and this closed-mindedness of considering a different perspective did not fully allow her to become a well-adjusted, motivated and integrated contributor to this new society. Akunna did not try cognitive strategies to fully understand the foundation of what drove American social discourse and the multi-faceted nature of what drove comfort with cultural misguidance. Therefore, she never sought strategies to build better empathy that would have enhanced her inter-cultural competencies and given more incentive to understand the specific dynamics of why most Americans acted and thought in the fashion they did. This was a deficiency of Akunna’s thinking and motivational strategies for coping that could have assisted her in better cultural adjustment. Real-world problem-solving is founded on these motivations and Akunna was quite closed to the notion that it was her that needed a change of attitude and strategy. The notion of the thing around your neck was that Akunna could not effectively cope with the dramatic differences between Nigerian culture and American culture and it maintained a type of choking of her cognitions, motivations and desire to be part of American society as a contributing member. She seemed largely to focus on the negative aspects of this new foreign culture and could not begin strategies to find harmony and positivity about it, again representing that she had been significantly traumatized by the reality of the culture and her expectations, even though they were quite false. Rather than simply, proverbially, put these misconceptions to bed and try to adjust, she simply allowed herself to remain distressed and troubled by the differences. Akunna might not have had to utilise psychology-based coping strategies, such as distancing or laughing at the issue, if she had been more flexible and tolerant of these differences. Task B Personally, I gained insight that if a person is to develop cultural intelligence, the ability to work effectively with foreign cultures, one has to be adaptable and not maintain strong ethnocentrism in the same capacity as Akunna. Reading fiction which is often filled with popular culture aspects and metaphors, could assist in gaining an understanding of another culture. It could serve as a means of recognizing the social cues that people give off as part of societal norms and provide knowledge of how others interact and the type of discourse to expect when exposed to such a culture. My CQ test emphasised a strong desire to gain CQ, but little knowledge. I think that reading fiction and pouring over literature (such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) could provide this valuable knowledge with practical application about foreign cultures as a preparatory measure for cross-cultural integration in the future. References Alon, I. & Higgins, J.M. (2005). Global leadership success through emotional and cultural intelligences. Business Horizons, 48(6), pp.501-512. Browaeys, M. & Price, R. (2011). Understanding cross-cultural management. Harlow: Pearson. Dolby, N. (2004). Encountering an American self: study abroad and national identity. Comparative Education Review, 48, pp.150-174. Early, P.C. & Peterson, R.S. (2004). The elusive cultural chameleon: cultural intelligence as a new approach to intercultural training for the global manager. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 3(1), pp.100-115. Kim, Y.J. & van Dyne, L. (2012). Cultural intelligence and international leadership potential: The importance of contact for members of the majority. Applied Psychology, 61(2), pp. 272-294. Nebreda, E. (2012). How to survive reverse culture shock: understand it, feel better and get your life back! Amazon Digital Services, Inc. Pandey, D.S. & Bhawuk, D.P.S. (1996). Asian contributions to cross-cultural psychology. New Delhi: Sage. Pantelidou, S. & Craig, T.K.J. (2006). Culture shock and social support. Social Psychiatry, 41, pp.777-781. Rockstuhl, T., et al (2011). Beyond general intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) : the role of cultural intelligence (CQ) on cross-border leadership effectiveness in a globalized world. Journal of Social Issues ,67(4) pp.825-840. Salter, F.K. (2002). Risky transactions: trust, kinship and ethnicity. Oxford: Berghahn. Staw, B.M. (2002). Research in organizational behaviour. Oxford: Elsevier. Templer, K.J., Tay, C. & Chandrasekar, N. (2006). Motivational Cultural Intelligence: Realistic Job Preview, Realistic Living Conditions Preview, and Cross-Cultural Adjustment. Group and Organization Management, 31, pp.154-173. Ward, C. & Bochner, S. (2001). The psychology of culture shock, 2nd edn. East Sussex: Routledge. Read More