WHAT ARE CROSS CULTURAL DIFFERENCES?

The way culture imprints itself on the manner a person thinks, acts, perceives the environment and reacts to things around him/her is very strong and virtually indelible. Culture determines every aspect of human behavior and gives rise to cultural identity in addition to national and our own individual identity. Amazingly, nearly all this imprinting is done before we reach the age of seven.

Regardless of the organization you join, you are likely to be dealing with people who come from various national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Without leaving your own country, you're likely to come into contact with people from a variety of backgrounds who work in your company, industry, and community. Cross cultural differences are all around us.

How then can we access cultural understanding to help us in our day-to-day relationships? First, it is important to understand and identify aspects of culture that lead to creating the way we think and behave. Also, we need to understand that the cultural spectrum holds different shades for a person, a society and a nation, helping each of them adapt to a common collective identity. Culture transcends its traditional role of providing a set of beliefs, customs, norms, values, ethics, traditions, moral, social and legal codes, perceptions, and philosophy. It becomes a kind of a framework for the society to function.

In addition, culture is strongly related with geographical setting of a place, religion, ethnicity and race, and explains why places on a sea coast share common elements of culture that are quite different from the cultures of mountainous places.

Cultural understanding derives from dovetailing all these cross cultural differences and creating awareness about how these differences impact the way people think, speak and behave.

Differences can be as small as having a different understanding about what time ‘dinner time' is; what ‘as soon as possible ‘ means, or even ‘when you are in mood to do this or that'.

Cross cultural differences can be the cause of many problems. It's important when you are working with multi-cultural staff to promote sensitivity to diversity, respectfulness and good intercultural communication.

1. Do you agree that the way culture imprints itself on us is very strong and virtually indelible? Give your reasons.

2. Is it possible to access cultural understanding to help people in their day-to-day relationships? Explain how.

3. Have you ever experienced any difficulties in understanding people from different cultures?

TEXT 2

Read the text and be ready to answer the following questions:

1. What can you say about the role of a manager working across national borders?

2. What is meant by “an effective global manager”? What are the criteria?

3. What is intercultural management?

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