Culture is communication and communication is culture.
Edward T. Hall
1976, p. 191
Culture? Yes…Culture!
I am and have always been passionate about culture. At the same time, my mind is stimulated and provoked with endless curiosity about the meaning of culture and its impact on human behavior in life, as well as in the workplace. I believe that one’s behavior at work is rooted in one’s cultural values. On the other hand, workplace practices, rituals, and routines can further shape one’s own cultural values. More than a decade ago, I began to craft my research on culturally oriented organizational behaviors, also known as cross-cultural management. Unsurprisingly, then, when I embarked on my PhD journey in 2001 in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, I chose to study culture. That was all I wanted to do, and that was exactly what I ended up doing. From day one, I told my peers and my professors that I would study culture. Some gave me a strange look; some gave me an approving look. Some said, “It’s too early to think of a topic,” while some said, “That’s good, you’re already clear about what you want to do.” Despite such conflicting remarks, I continued to craft my research topic, finding ways to verify that such study is needed and worth it, adamant to stamp my PhD topic with the word culture.
It is challenging to study culture, since the concept itself has been defined by scholars in more than 160 ways. The key question often pointed out to me during intellectual discourse was “How do you measure culture, or how do you explain and describe such an intricate concept?”
Certainly, culture oftentimes carries intangible meanings that are abstract and difficult to comprehend or analyze. Culture is an abstract concept with many varied definitions (Ferraro 2003; Schneider & Barsoux 1997; Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952). In this book, I define culture as a pattern of behaviors that are shared by a group of people (i.e., from a shared national identity, ethnicity, or race) that rests on basic assumptions. The basic assumption used in this study is drawn from Hall’s (1976) cultural dimension called context. In terms of cultural communication, context has two poles, high context (HC) and low context (LC), to distinguish between context-oriented and content-oriented communication. HC people emphasize the nonverbal aspects of communication (body language, tone of voice, situation, etc.), whereas LC people emphasize the verbal aspects of communication (words alone, written, or spoken).
Examining the impact of culture on behavior has provoked me to consider many questions, such as what, why, who, when, and how a person thinks, feels, and behaves due to the effects of culture. It has inspired me to discover the cognitive elements of a human brain and then explore the emotional state of a person’s feelings in order to justify why a certain action or behavior is fully demonstrated or implied. Thus, the challenge is how to capture all these questions and how to explore them on such a variable dimension. My curious mind then went further: why does culture influence our behavior in the workplace? Does culture matter differently in different management roles, in particular, for processes such as decision making? In what ways does culture influence the decision-making process when it takes place in a distributed form, such as GVTs?
I began my research journey by exploring culture using a unique research context: the virtual workspace. I had three reasons for doing so. First, one consequence of globalization has been a high mobility of employees, which has changed the landscape and structure of the workplace. Globalization liberates people to move across borders wherever and whenever they desire in order to be employed. Similar patterns can be observed in the movement of goods and services that are free to be transported, exported, and imported worldwide. Second, with the widespread availability of new and more advanced technological and social media tools, the work setting has been transformed into a different structure and has taken different forms for both work and play. Third, the distributed work setting resulting from this, also known as the virtual workspace, allows people to be collocated with other team members without the need to travel and to work together despite barriers of geographical space, different time zones, and diverse cultural values. The common mantra of GVTs is anywhere, anytime, and with anyone.
However, as might be expected with such an innovative work structure, many challenges arise, and many questions are left unanswered. One of these questions is “How do you manage far-flung human resources when they are collaborating and working at a distance?”
The structure of this book is divided into five sections, comprising 17 chapters. The introduction explains the motivation for writing the book and outlines its structure. In Section I, I present the phenomenon of anywhere, anytime, and with anyone to highlight the prevalence of the virtual workplace in contemporary multinational or international organizations and discuss the research background, which has its roots in one subgroup as the GVTs of Civil Society during the World Summit on the Information Society.
In Section II, I define the concept of culture by providing an overview in understanding between three different levels of human mental programming that clearly denote culture as a group phenomenon, not specific to an individual or encompassing the universal human needs. I further explain the distinctive characteristics of culture through an onion model, which has three different layers—(1) artifacts and symbols, (2) norms and values, and (3) basic assumptions and behaviors. It is important to clearly understand the concept with its many layers as it helps us to understand the multifaceted behaviors of people at the workplace, particularly during the decision-making process. Under this section, the book also provides two distinctive theoretical lenses to ground the understanding of cultural impacts on the distributed decision-making process—Edward Hall’s (1976) high context versus low context and Fons Trompenaars’s (1993) seven dimensions.
Section III discusses the decision-making process by integrating two perspectives. First, I looked at Kingdon’s decision-making model, which highlights the political decision process. Second, I applied Adler’s (1997) decision-making model to further explain the cultural influence on such process. As a result, I presented an empirical model of a distributed decision-making process that integrates both Kingdon’s and Adler’s model, which is unique to the environment of GVTs. Based on the findings, the study concludes that the distributed decisions made by the team members are based on a cyclical model that is more iterative and dynamic as compared to a sequential process that is suggested by Kingdon.
Section IV further refines the understanding on the distributed decision-making process by considering specific cultural elements. Adler’s model suggests that every aspect of the decision-making process is much attuned to the cultural values that belong either in a society or in a group. Therefore, under this section, I present several chapters that illustrate the impacts of cultural values on decision making such as individualism versus communitarianism and task oriented versus relationship oriented. Another aspect would be focused on the intercultural communication styles that examine the impact of directness versus indirectness and detailed versus ambiguous on the way that people communicate in the email discussions for proposing ideas; highlighting problems; deliberating the ideas, problems, and issues; and then arriving at a decision.
Finally, in Section V, I provide several implications that are critical for multinational organizations in order to achieve, as well as sustain, high-performing GVTs. Undeniably, in the current global work environment, many multinational corporations or international-based organizations thrive on virtual workspace and virtual structure to capitalize their global human resources. As the prevailing strategic plans, GVTs assemble synergistic members across the world to collaborate hand in hand to meet organizational goals. At the same time, by utilizing GVTs, companies can reap profits from their much-reduced costs because of the elimination of travelling expenses and the cost of failure in expatriation. Thus, I will include three chapters on the know-how or the dos and don’ts in working in a virtual workspace, the reasons and motivation to develop cross-cultural competencies, and ways to strategically manage the impacts of the cultural values’ differences on the distributed decision-making process. As a conclusion, the book offers an affirmation that culture counts even at a distance in the globally distributed collaboration phenomenon.
References
Adler, N.J. 1997. International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, 3rd ed. Cincinnati, OH: South-Western.
Ferraro, G.P. 2003. The Cultural Dimension of International Business. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Hall, E.T. 1976. Beyond Culture. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books/Doubleday.
Kroeber, A.L. & Kluckhohn, C. 1952. Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Retrieved October 13, 2015, available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/230913406/Kroeber-y-Kluckhohn-1952-Culture-a-critical-review-of-concepts-and-definitions#scribd.
Schneider, S.C. & Barsoux, J. 1997. Managing Across Cultures. London: Prentice Hall.
Trompenaars, F. 1993. Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business. London: Economist Books.