Building Trust across Cultural Boundaries

Research indicates that there is a strong correlation between components of trust (such as communication effectiveness, conflict management) and productivity. Cultural differences play a key role in the creation of trust, since trust is built in different ways and means different things in different cultures.

For instance, in the U.S., trust is “demonstrated performance over time”. Here you can gain the trust of your collegues by “coming through” and delivering on time on your commitments. In many other parts of the world, including many Arab, Asian and Latin American countries, building relationships is a pre-requisite for professional interactions. Building trust in these countries often involves lengthy discussions on non-professional topics and shared meals in restaurants. Work-related discussions start only once your counterpart has become comfortable with you as a person.

Cultural differences in multicultural teams can create misunderstandings between team members before they have had a chance to establish any credibility with each other. Thus, building trust is a critical step in creation and development of such teams. As a manager of a multicultural team, you need to recognize that building trust between different people is a complex process, since each culture has its own way of building trust and its own interpretation of what trust is.

Harnessing the Power of Diversity. Diversity is aspecialized term describing a workplace that includes people from various backgrounds and cultures, and/or diverse businesses. You can find a strategic competitive advantage in organizational and cultural context by seeking to leverage, rather than diminish, opposite forces. “An important but widely overlooked principle of business success is that integrating opposites, as opposed to identifying them as inconsistencies and driving them out, unleashes power.” This is true on both a personal level (the balanced manager is more effective than his peer at one end of the control spectrum) and on organizational level as well.

 Text 2.  The role of corporate culture and ethics in business world.

Every company strives for its own organizational style, philosophy and traditions, for its special way of problem solving, its values and internal socializing.

All those components constitute the policy of in-company communication and belong to its culture. The core of a corporate culture represents the staff convictions and company philosophy. Any company can strengthen its principles of activity by selection of new team workers, which aim and behavior will be suitable for its corporate culture. It’s well known that the internal environmental factors are closely connected with a corporate culture and include all organizational resources. Finally, choosing a company, people choose a life style; corporate culture can shape not only their approach to work, and career forming, but also their life.

Therefore corporate culture represents values, convictions, rules and behavior standard. In some companies, corporate culture is very strong, and all staff members know their goals, and work day-to-day to reach them. Moreover, corporate culture influences the work of everyone and affects everything; in other words, the strong corporate culture impacts the whole business and, finally, leads to success.

Factors, which influence the organizational culture:

- corporate vision, mission and goal;

- strategy;

- work maintenance;

- education and experience of personnel;

- personality of employer;

- economic conditions;

- nation and culture of staff members;

- business environment.

Corporate culture allows to differ one organization from another and helps save and strengthen organizational values.

However, corporate culture is put to the changes in course of time. A company has seven key-points to change corporate culture. The employer together with employees should:

- understand the “old” corporate culture;

- listen to people, who know some ideas relating to the new corporate culture;

- “keep the nose to the wind”, “probe the ground” and search the better traits of corporate culture;

- not wait for miracle;

- foresee for 5-10 years;

- be patient (and the win comes)!

The effective corporate culture intends the strong management level and high morale – the marks of corporate ethics.