2020-01-15
378
Intercultural learning can be viewed as following a process. The starting point, level one, is a state of unawareness – a state of not recognizing that cultural differences exist. It is an attitude of ‘our way is the only way’ or ‘everyone is like us’.
Through intellectual contact, communication and observation, people can move to level two, a state of being aware of the differences. This is an attitude of ‘other people have different ways of doing things from us’.
From awareness comes level three, tolerance. This is the attitude of ‘they are different from us’, but without attaching any judgment of better or best.
When individuals are transplanted into a new culture for whatever reason, they are likely to experience a culture shock, which can be an extremely disappointing situation. The individual is faced with three basic choices: tolerating and adapting to the new culture, remaining, but with a negative attitude towards the host culture or returning to the home culture.
From tolerances of differences, the final level – four – is possible. This is a state of using our differences positively to achieve team work and the attitude is one of ‘let us work together in an integrated manner’.
Roots of cultural differences. Cultural differences evolve because given groups of people develop different values and basic concepts for understanding the worlds around them and for guiding their action. These differences can become barriers between cultures because of four human factors.
First, the psychological processes and defense mechanisms or the individual can result in suspicion and distrust.
Second, barriers are often reinforced by group dynamics, that is, the predisposition of groups to close ranks against other groups and to stereotype them.
Third, barriers may be built up as a result of the competitive nature of business. All parties are not going to get everything they want, so they must fight, compete or find collaborative forms of working together.
National cultures can also be broken down into different subcultures, such as regional, class, generational, and professional.
The increasing internationalization of business over last decades has brought about such themes as globalization and transnational companies.
We are often led to believe that the world is gradually becoming a smaller global village where some universal principals of being an effective manager apply.
However, within this global village, there still appear as many different approaches to business as there are national cultures. For example, ‘management by objectives (MBO)’ is regarded as a sound management practice in many cultures, but is seen as ‘losing face’ in others.
For a business to succeed in a multinational or international environment, it has to be able to identify and quantify the values, beliefs, expectations and ways of doing business of everybody involved. Responding to the complexity, diversity and ambiguity of cultures becomes a crucial task of management and training alike.
