Cross-Culture Behavior Issues - Essay Example

? Term Paper - Cross Culture Behaviour A self-critical discussion of questions regarding the imparted material Confidential 199515 31 March 2012 Lecturer: Dr. Mark A. Baker 1 Table of Contents 1. Preface This term paper was an assignment based on Self-Management lecture part two held on 18th and 19th of November 2011 at Kempten University. As per definition of the assignment paper, students needed to select and describe two or more questions that could not only engage one’s interest but also had the potential of developing one’s own culture behaviour and professional meaning for one’s special area of interest. This paper refers to: Description of one’s personal understanding of the own culture Description of one’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral cultural Intelligence Development of one’s CQ strengths and reducing weaknesses in such a way that one can become more effective in interacting with a culturally diverse people We have learned that awareness of one’s behaviour is the first step to solve differences, as well as to handle them adequately. This awareness also increases one’s ability to do cross-cultural communication. We are all creatures of our culture and have our own cultural backgrounds. However, we come across people from different cultures in our daily life. Even in our own culture, we need to understand different characters. It is necessary for all of us to show respect and worthiness to other people in order to reach our personal and business goals. Therefore, I was interested in taking this course. This course helped me learn actively based on my experience of dealing with people from different cultures during work. This course also helped me get a better awareness of become a better person who could interact with culturally diverse people and solve their problems. In order to become a leader, who can interact successfully with different characters and culture-based behaviours of his/her colleagues, I want to improve my ability to get benefits from the cultural complexity of people with different nationalities, work areas, professional backgrounds, personalities, and organizational cultures. I believe that cultural Intelligence combines emotional, cognitive, and practical dimensions of cross-cultural encounters and provides a more effective and fulfilling cross-cultural collaboration. Therefore, leadership is also the ability of a person to lead people on technical, as well as on soft areas. 2. Description of Personal Understanding of Own Culture In this section of the paper, I would like to describe my own culture and personality, as well as my cultural beliefs, norms and values, and the way they developed. “I am a responsible, creative, solution-oriented, warm-hearted, sexual, ambitious, striving, foresighted, sensitive, orderly, sensual, perfection-oriented, humorous, nice, helpful, strict, pragmatic, multi-interested, tough, conservative, workaholic, multidiscipline, and openhearted person. Moreover, I am also a well organized, well structured, intellectual, harmony-loving, Loyal, funny, frame-loving, conflict-avoiding, polite, crystal clear, thoughtful, animal-loving, assimilative, left-brained, selfless, introverted, strong, and a sincere person. I want to be nice at home, quick at repartee, and helpful for my friends” In order to avoid misunderstandings, I do not think all these adjective descriptors are positive. Therefore, there is a lot of self-critical in it as I tried to create an objective description, which also includes the meaning of other persons. To explain some descriptors better, I want to add the following: I guess I am not a workaholic. I like to work, but the result of my 150% schedule is more an escape, a missing of acceptance and compliment, striving for appraisal, or inner restlessness. I feel misunderstood in the core of my being. I always have to explain myself. Even my body language and face mimic is often misinterpreted by others. For example, when I feel sad, people ask me why I look so angry. I always feel like an outsider. In my childhood, I had been in contact with adults most of the time. Today, I always have my friends separated. So none of my friends knows or meets me. I have no circle of friends. I do not know the way to give birthday parties. I guess none of my friends would like to think the way I think. I think one has something to do with the inner yearning for exclusiveness. Mostly it takes approximately two to three years before the people independently, if private or business contacts, become able to predict who I am or to rethink their first judgement. Now, I will try to take on the adjective descriptors that I wrote down and put them into three levels of selfless or self-identity (Error: Reference source not found) pursuant to the figure on page 14 of the course material. As they are too many, I copied only the most representative descriptors. Universal to Human Nature Specificto Groups Neurological and Learned Inherited and Learned Specific to Individuals Biological and Inherited Figure : The Different Levels of Selfness or Self-Identity - personal valuation of the author Therefore, it is clear that we are not the ones we think. We are all parts of a cultural system with stereotypes. Due to the separation of the descriptors into three levels, there are not much personality descriptors left. Since I live in my own culture and I really feel like in my own home, all of my cultural values are reflected. In comparison to the Hofstede?s Work Values Index (1997) on page 22 in the course, material power distance of Germans was 35, individualism 67, masculinity 66, uncertainty/avoidance 65; pursuant to that, my self-assessment on value continuums was 63, 75, 60, and 85. I guess the departure is based on personal life experiences and my values as a “normal” German in common are reflected. In my daily life, I mostly find problems based on personality of some persons but not based on the differences between cultural or human nature factors even if I work with persons from different cultures. To be honest, it is different to have a business-based relationship or a private based relationship that you have to handle with people from different cultures. In addition, it also makes a difference if you work with people from different cultures who grow up in Germany, or with people, who came here only for a couple of years from their home countries. I guess everybody wants to be individual but in the end, we all try to fulfil the cultural requirements and human nature descriptors the best we can in order to live with the community, because community means shelter to all of us. 3. Description of Own Cognitive, Emotional and Behavioural Cultural Intelligence My understanding of cultural intelligence is that I can understand the impact of my individual cultural background on my behavior, which is essential for a successful business life, as well as for fulfilling private relationships. It is important for me as a leader to develop and use my ability to engage successfully in any business and private environment or social setting in common. My understanding of cultural intelligence is to speak to a worker, to a farmer, or to any person with the same respect and honor paired with the ability to talk at their “level” that in the end they think that we are from the same culture (national or international). In Germany, we learn very early to distinguish between good and less good or up and down. We have no good understanding of “middle”. In the age of nine, a primary school child will be confronted for the first time to be good (Gymnasium) versus good (Hauptschule / Realschule). Very early, we set the course and separate good from bad and have this premium versus working class separation, which leads to a culture with anti-socialization from my point of understanding. My strengths are that I am very structured, self-critic, and able to do many things at a time. I have a very high stress tolerance. I have always an open ear for the people who have the goal to solve problems. My strengths are my rational and pragmatic characteristics. I think about what is going on and make judgments based on conceptual frameworks in business. I am able to balance both sides and try to be fair-minded. I am adaptable, but not flexible. I am open for critics and for transfer of experience. My limitations in this area are that sometimes I am too strict to give others the solutions. I often feel insecure if a new argument rises up. In my private life, I do not like to take decisions. I often think for years before I take a decision, because I have the feeling that a decision could have such an impact that I may not be able to handle or control. My emotional cultural intelligence relates to feeling component of a situation and the motivation to generate solutions. My strengths are that I am very creative and can feel the emotional condition and the needs of the persons living in my area. I can predict the dangers. I can feel engaged too. I am also a future-focused person. My weaknesses or limitations are that I treat everyone in a strict manner. I am too strict and want things to be done in a very short time. Very often, I become impatient which leads to conflicts or misunderstandings. My behavior with others is really a big problem for me. As long as I am not familiar with a situation, a team, or a task, I feel very uncomfortable, insecure, and rubbish. My body language obviously gives others the feeling that I am arrogant or unwilling to do something or that I am not a good person. I guess the top of my iceberg is very ugly. It always takes so much time for me to feel comfortable and accepted or to show my potential. I have no problems with etiquette, rituals, rules and techniques, listening, questioning, summarizing, agreeing or disagreeing etc., but I am often misinterpreted. The crux of this part of my cultural intelligence brings the other two dimensions into play. Therefore, I have to work on this limitation in particular. 4. Personal Plan for Strengths Development and Weaknesses Reduction In order to improve my cultural capabilities, I would like to work on my cognitive, emotional, and behavioural CQ. Some weeks ago, I was asked to work with a new team. This will start in a few days. Since it is a team of eight people, it is a culturally diverse team. Two people are from Germany, one from Turkey, one from Greece, two from France, one from Scotland, and one from Ireland. The team perfectly fits to my intention to do effective communication with the people from other cultures. Pursuant to the new knowledge from the cross culture course, I wrote down the name of each team member. I noted home country and city, duration in Germany, experience, and technical position/discipline, role in the team, the numbers of Hofstede?s Work, values index of power distance, individualism, and masculinity and uncertainty/avoidance. I made a short trip to their countries via Google Earth and searched some lovely characteristics of Germans, Turks, Greeks, French, Scotsmen, and Irish. I actively avoided searching for negative things in order to avoid unnecessary prejudice or falsification of my first picture of my team mates. After that, I sat back and thought about one of the persons for about a quarter of an hour - only one person a day in order to avoid mixing them with one another. I also used to think about their possible conflicting matters and their needs. After five days, I sat in front of six slips of paper – one for the German representatives as well – and thought about the best way of including them in the team. After some weeks, I will ask them to give me a short feedback, which will help me improve the “settings”, if necessary. I believe that one cannot reduce a person only to his/her cultural background. This would end in a one-way street. It is also important to recognise one’s personality and his/her way of doing work. As far as I have learned, the German leadership style is very special. Germans tend to distribute tasks but not the responsibilities. Moreover, we tend to have a clear articulation. Even when I support an equally associated leadership style, I cannot absolve entirely from tending to lead like a “normal” German, especially when you are the focal point of responsibility, under pressure to fulfil tasks, and to reach goals in a tough milestone plan. However, the goal is to become a good intercultural operating manager. So I will ask for more feedbacks regarding the leadership style. In order to develop my cultural capabilities, I will actively ask for feedback and will try to reflect the critics. Three things are very important to consider. The holistic problem should not be the orientation. I will motivate the team to be active and outcome-oriented. Moreover, I will not value their actions if they are will not be 100% perfect solutions. I will not try not to delegate tasks but responsibilities. I will want to share information by working together. Some weeks ago, a colleague from Brazil came to me since she had a problem with a new task. She felt very insecure and was afraid to fail. She was also afraid of not being able to fulfil her boss’s expectations. She had no clear idea of the way to get started and the way to solve the task she was asked to do. I listened to her and asked her the way she did it in different projects in which she had worked before. Then I asked her for the transferability of existing processes, lessons learned, and workshop material. I helped her define a structure and determine the next steps. After that, she was very relieved and said to me, “It is always so easy when I talk to you. You helped me so quickly. When I talk to you and I have a problem, you are always the light at the end of the tunnel…..” It was really a very nice compliment for me. Therefore, to develop a management approach that internationally worked; I illustrated the negative impact of the German leadership style with suggestion of improvement in order to avoid teamwork related confusions and mistakes. 5. Conclusion It is different feeling for a person to work in his/her own country with foreign colleagues or as a foreigner abroad. For the first group colleagues from foreign countries attract interest, because differences attract. Sometimes as Germans, we are astonished to see colleagues from other countries can also do engineering or have a competitive curriculum at the university. In order to remember our own inadequateness, awareness and self-critic play the role of important cultural intelligence indicators. It was helpful for me to think about the onion model (Error: Reference source not found) in order to get a better metaphoric image of our mental programming, as well as to improve adapting and assimilation. The first layer is sort of corporate design, the second layer reflects our characteristics, and the third layer represents our rites, which are important for a community. These three layers are visible for others. The forth and fifth layer are one’s assessed values and norms, fundamental assumptions which differentiate good from bad within a specific culture. These layers are not visible to others. 1st Layer: Symbols 2nd Layer: Heros 3rd Layer: Rites 4th Layer: Values 5th Layer: Basic Assumptions Figure: Culture OnionofHofstede After the work on this term paper, I have developed a better awareness of my culture and my cultural behaviour. I have become able to distinguish my cultural identity from my personality. Though it is still difficult to work with people from other cultures, but it is easy if hey have same cultural backgrounds. I have learned to see Germans from a more distanced angle and more objectively. I have also learned to scrutinise my work behaviour. Enjoying successes is not a typical German behaviour but in order to become a successful leader, it is also important not to compliment people if they do a great job and to give them positive feedback from time to time. A Bavarian old saw “Ned g?schimpft is g?lobt gnua!” (Analogously “Not to lay into somebody is sufficient complimenting”) is not very motivating. From my point of view, a successful leader has to be a good peer. A successful leader needs to have a broad horizon and effective leadership skills in order to reach the best results hand in hand with a multi-cultural team. 6. References Following resources were used to write this term paper: Baker, Mark, Cross Cultural Behaviour Script and Workbook, 2011 Reimer, Annett, Die Bedeutung der Kulturtheorie von Geert Hofstede fur das internationale Management, Heft 20/2005, Wismar Discussion Papers 7. List of Figures 8. Declaration This term paper was solely written by me and no other resources or aids other than the ones shown under references were used. Signed Christine Lang Read More

 

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