Cultural Differences Of The Workplace

Those that go into the business world quickly recognize that each work environment they find themselves in can be total different from another. This can especially be said even of environments within the United States, from region to region. There is definitely a disparity of workplace environments from country to country. Not only can culture drive a varied atmosphere, but the diversity of the personnel making up that environment can equally create a challenge that a leader must be prepared to manage. Recognizing that special care needs to be placed on communication and perception skills is crucial in our present professional domain. Managers of today need to employee tools from the psychological and sociological field to be successful. Having a deep understanding in the differences in culture and diversity in the workplace is critical, especially when debating about accepting a position overseas or assigning an employee to an embedded position abroad. With a broad knowledge of cultural differences and diversity, success as a manager and the stability of a positive work environment can be achieved and maintained without unnecessary effort and focus.

Culture in the workplace can be a barrier that obstructs the good communication between people with different backgrounds. The main challenge that people face is language. This is because it is a very complex thing, and misuse of one word can change the meaning of the message. Also, hostile stereotypes can affect communication because the stereotypes only create a barrier of characteristics towards other people that prevents to have a good interaction. Behavior differences is also an obstacle to communication, this is because the cultures have guidelines of what is considered appropriate for their society. On the other hand, the demonstration of emotions is also considered a challenge, because what for some cultures is appropriate for others

Thank you! The insights that are gleaned from qualitative research are valuable. Absolutely, those that are charged with the care and safety of others need to speak up when their safety is at risk. I agree that having the courage to speak up does come with more experience, but the administrative environment or culture is also a factor. One administrative framework that is used at the hospital that I work at is Just Culture, which seeks to foster a blame-free environment in order for staff to come forward. The aim of Just Culture is to attribute error to the system and not the individual (Decker & Breakey, 2016).

The second approach is constituted by Hofstede, who makes various researches to compare work-related values across employees working for a multinational corporation IBM in a total of 65 countries. Using the information obtained with these researches Hofstede produced a comparison between national cultures on five dimensions:

The most famous researcher of prevailing cultures in different countries goes by the name of Geert Hofstede. “He conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture” (). With the help of his research team, Professor Geert Hofstede created a model of national culture consisting of six dimensions. “The cultural dimensions represent independent preferences for on state of affairs

This knowledge of weakness should not be used against people of other cultures or in stereotyping individuals. In obtaining the indices, research was based on data obtained from IBM employees. According to Hofstede, “dimensions and associated country scores were developed through factor analysis of the means of nationally aggregated individual item responses which were collected as part of IBM employee surveys” (Hofstede 491). The problem, however, is that as much as this may be useful in determining the culture of a country, it does not have enough diverse subjects to form a complete perception of an individual, cultural group or organization; especially an organization different from IBM. The diversity of ethnicity, religious belief, social economic status, education and other variables that makes up an individual’s value system may not be reflected in the average IBM employee. Brewer and Verniak, in their article On the Misuse of National Culture Dimensions, believe “The correlations among the items used to measure the national culture dimensions are positive and highly significant at the aggregated national (also known as “ecological”) level, but are mostly low and insignificant and sometimes of opposite sign at the individual level” (Brewer and Venaik

Developing cultural diversity in the workplace is an important factor in creating a sociable and productive work environment. The mission and vision of an organization should be representative of the cultural diversity of their employees. When I immigrated to the U.S., like many other immigrant I chose New York as a place to live and work. My decision was based on the population diversity of this metropolitan city, which was going to ease my integration in the American lifestyle and workforce. Ironically enough, in my current work place I have had the unique opportunity to work with people from all over the world. As a joke we call our office the “United Nation”. Besides the employees born in the US, the rest of us originate from 9 different countries including Peru, Dominican Republican, Puerto Rico, Bengali, Egypt, Albania, Jamaica, and Nepal. It is the best environment to work as we have a conglomerate of upbringings, customs, backgrounds, languages, personalities and different perspectives.

This paper describes the various aspects of a culturally diverse workplace including the benefits, detriments, and acceptance strategies. The University of Massachusetts, Boston and IBM are examples of organizations understanding the benefits of multicultural groups and taking the initiative to develop innovative strategies to recruit and retain diverse members. Besides noticeable differences, leaders must contend with unobservable differences. Hofstede identified cultural differences after researching components of IBM and as a result, developed the Dimensions of Cultural Distances. Leaders who understand the social differences will have a better opportunity to communicate with their employees without offending personnel. Regrettably, countries and regions such as Latin America and Saudi Arabia underutilize women in the workforce, which weakens the diversity in the working environment. Fighting to change political policies is one opportunity leaders can take to make a positive difference in global diversity while respecting their personal values.

The topics that may be relevant to cultural or workplace diversity in Global Issues in Context refer to the infinite differences in cultural diversity that give us some peek into the different working of other people and may inform us of how to better understand them in order to better our working and social relationship with them. An understanding, too, of global health conditions is also relevant to cultural issues as is different cultural practices in economic related matters, the different forms of government, and the different way that people across the globe live, conduct their lives, and interact in a social manner.

Dr. Hofstede performed a comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. In the 1970’s, as a Dutch researcher Dr. Geert Hofstede, collected and analyzed data from 116,000 surveys taken from IBM employees in forty different countries around the world. From those results, Hofstede developed a model that identifies four primary dimensions of differentiate cultures. These include: Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), Masculinity-Femininity (MAS), Individualism-Collectivism (IND), Power and Distance (PD). After a further study of the Asian culture by researcher Michael Bond in 1991, Hofstede added a fifth dimension in his theory, Long- and Short-term time orientation (LTO), also referred to as the Confucian Dynamism. His research has framed how cultural differences can be used in professional business transactions. Geert Hofstede 's dimensions analysis can assist the business person in better understanding the intercultural differences within regions and between countries.

Not long ago my sister recommended me to read Richard Steers’ book “Management across Cultures: Challenges and Strategies”. It was a great book with many interesting insights but one particular chapter called “Culture, Values, and Worldviews” opened my eyes a little bit and helped me to understand why exactly I have never fully fit into any of the new countries I lived in. I understood that the problem was not in me but it is more of a cultural thing. According to Steers, there are five core cultural dimensions that all countries and their cultures can be analysed by – how the power and authority are distributed among the society, whether people are more individualistic or collectivistic, how they perceive the environment, their time and work patterns and the way societies try to reduce uncertainties.

The importance of understanding cultural, ethnic and gender differences by managers and professionals in a business setting is essential to make the work environment comfortable. In every culture there are basic standards of thinking, and acting and these cultural differences strongly influence workplace values and communication. What may be considered acceptable and natural in the workplace for one person may be unacceptable for another person. People from diverse cultures bring new ways of thinking, creativity and language skills needed to survive in today’s work force. In many

Culture in its many forms and approaches is a very popular subject researched by many authors. The definition of culture from Geert Hofstede, the most cited social scientist according to Powell (2006) comes as "the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of humans from another". (1982) He mentions that these differences exist in nations, geographic regions, generations, genders, social classes and many more. As Hofstede simply puts it, "the unwritten rules of

A popular theme among businesses is the expansion across nations ' borders. Nelson & Quick (2015) describes an expatriate manager as a person who does business in a country different than their own country. Expanding business can be a vital move for businesses to grow. Nelson & Quick (2015, pg. 17) suggests that, "the world is free from national boundaries and is borderless." The key to success when doing business is knowing the cultural differences of that country. The aspects of cultural differences to take into account vary from the individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and time orientation of a country. If I was to choose a country to do business I would choose Australia. Professor Hofstede scored Australia 's culture in six different categories. According to Professor Hofstede 's research (n.d), Australia has a power distance score of 36, individualism score at a 90, masculinity score of 61, uncertainty score of a 51, long term orientation score of a 21, and indulgence score of a 71.

When a business decides to venture internationally into different countries with its products, services, and operations, it is very important that the company gains an understanding of how the culture of the different societies affects the values found in those societies. Geert Hofstede conducted one of the most famous and most used studies on how culture relates to values. Hofstede study enabled him to compare dimensions of culture across 40 countries. He originally isolated four dimensions of what he claimed summarized different cultures — power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity (Hill, 2013, p.110). To cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm Hofstede has since added two more dimensions — Confucianism or long-term orientation and indulgence versus self-restraint (Hofstede, n.d.). Because of the way Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are given an index score from 0-100, it is easy for a company to get a general comparison between the cultures they are expanding into and the culture they are already in.