Multicultural Teamwork: Accommodate Multiple Perspectives
WHEN YOU SEE AN AUARIUM WITH FISHES
….Do you see the fish or the aquarium? There is a big
difference between the thought patterns of specific and holistic thinkers that
can undo a multicultural team’s effectiveness.
I was teaching a course to a class of Executive MBA
students at INSEAD and I had just given them a small-group assignment. One of
the groups was made up of two British students, one German, one American and
one Chinese. They had twenty minutes to discuss a case study and then to
prepare the answers to four very specific questions.
The Chinese student, let’s call him Michael Shen,
started the discussions. He began by making some very interesting and important
comments about the case and the cell phone industry in general, discussing how
the sector had developed and impacted the various countries in the case.
However, his observations, though fascinating, were not really answers to the
first question.
After several moments Michael’s colleagues were
becoming visibly impatient. Steve, one of the U.K. students interrupted him.
“That’s really interesting Michael, but we only have fifteen minutes to discuss
these four questions. I think the answer to question one is on page three,
paragraph four, sentence two, where it says…” He used that sentence to answer
the question and then moved onto the next question.
Steve said to me after class, “That’s happened to us a
few times during this module – that one of our classmates from China begins by
taking several minutes to discuss peripheral information, before looping back
to the point. I get frustrated. Just answer question one!”
This behaviour reflects the different cultural norms
of East Asia and the West. Of course each East Asian and each Western culture
is different – often dramatically so. But for this concept we can draw this
basic differentiation to understand why Steve and Michael had such different
thought patterns.
Multicultural perspectives
In a study conducted by
Professors Richard Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, twenty-second animated video
vignettes of underwater scenes were presented to Japanese and American
participants. Afterward, participants were asked what they had seen.
While the Americans mentioned larger, faster-moving,
brightly-coloured objects in the foreground (such as the big fish), the
Japanese spoke more about what was going on in the background (for example, the
small frog bottom left). The Japanese also talked twice as often as the
Americans about the interdependencies between the objects up front and the
objects in the background.
In a second study, Americans and Japanese were asked
to “take a photo of a person”. The Americans most frequently took a close-up,
showing all facial features, while the Japanese showed the person in his or her
environment with the human figure quite small.
Notice the common pattern in both studies. The
Americans focus on individual items separate from their environment, while the
Asians give more attention to backgrounds – and to the links between these
backgrounds and the central figures.
The origins of specific and holistic thinking
These tendencies have been borne out in my own
interviews with multi-cultural managers. While Northern Europeans and
Anglo-Saxons generally follow the American thinking patterns, East Asians
respond as the Japanese and Taiwanese did in Nisbett and Masuda’s research.
Perhaps it’s not surprising. A traditional tenet of
Western philosophies and religions is that you can remove an item from its
environment and analyse it separately. Cultural theorists call this specific
thinking.
Chinese religions and philosophies, by contrast, have
traditionally emphasised interdependencies and interconnectedness. The Ancient
Chinese thought in a holistic way, believing that action
always occurs in a field of forces. The terms yin and yang (literally
“dark” and “light”), for example, describe how seemingly contrary forces are
interdependent.
Here’s what one of my Chinese students said after we’d
discussed the fish and photo studies:
"Chinese people think from macro to micro,
whereas Western people think from micro to macro. For example, when writing an
address, the Chinese write in sequence of province, city, district, block, gate
number. Westerners do just the opposite. In the same way, Chinese put the
surname first, whereas Westerners do it the other way around. And Chinese put
the year before month and date."
Management faux pas
This impacts the way business people view each other
across the globe. As Bae Pak from the Korean motor company Kia told me, “When
we work with Western colleagues, we are often taken aback by their tendency to
make decisions without considering the impact on other business units, clients,
and suppliers.”
One Polish manager, Jacek Malecki, provided this
example: “When I took my first trip to meet with my Japanese staff I managed
the objective-setting process like I always had. I called each person on the
team into my office for a meeting, where I outlined his or her individual goals.
Although I noticed they asked a lot of peripheral questions during the meetings
no one actually explained to me that my approach was not ideal for them, so I
went back to Poland with a false sense of comfort.”
Later Malecki saw that the team had spent a lot of
time consulting with one another about what each person had been asked to do
and how their individual objectives fit together to create a big picture: “The
team was now making good progress but not in the way I had segmented the
project.”
In a specific culture, people usually
respond well to receiving very detailed and segmented information about what is
expected of each of them. If you need to give instructions to a team member
from this kind of culture, focus on what that person needs to accomplish and
when. Conversely, if you need to motivate, manage, or persuade someone from
a holistic culture, spend time explaining the big picture and how
all the pieces slot together.
If you are leading a global team, this type of
cognitive diversity can cause confusion, inefficiency, and general
frustration. But we’ve known for a long time that the more diverse the
team, the greater the potential for innovation. If you understand that one
person sees a fish and another sees an aquarium, and you think carefully about
the benefits of both the specific and holistic approach, you can learn to turn
these cultural differences into your team’s greatest assets.
Erin Meyer is
an Affiliate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD where she is also
the Programme Director of Managing
Global Virtual Teams and Management
Skills for International Business two of INSEAD's executive development programmes. She
is also the author of The Culture
Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. You can follow Erin on Twitter @ErinMeyerINSEAD
Read more at http://knowledge.insead.edu/blog/insead-blog/multicultural-teamwork-accommodate-multiple-perspectives-3489?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=2289debc0a-14_Aug_mailer8_14_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e079141ebb-2289debc0a-249840429&nopaging=1#ZOMZ6HouVI
No comments:
Post a Comment