Erin Meyer's The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business offers a thoughtful and detailed exploration of the ways in which differences in national culture affect our efforts to communicate across borders.
Meyer, an American who teaches at INSEAD, draws on the work of previous researchers in the field, most notably Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars and she shares credit generously, but her own significant contribution is the Culture Map itself, a framework that looks at communication on multiple dimensions and locates various national cultures on each one.
I've distilled her findings for the seven largest economies in the world at the moment--the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Brazil--and mapped them on each spectrum. The indented passages below are excerpted from The Culture Map and correspond to the slides above, interspersed with my comments on the implications of this data for working in the US.
1. Communication Style
Low-Context: Good communication is precise, simple, and clear. Messages are expressed and understood at face value. Repetition is appreciated if it helps clarify the communication.
High-Context: Good communication is sophisticated, nuanced, and layered. Messages are both spoken and read between the lines. Messages are often implied but not plainly expressed. (page 39)
It's noteworthy to me--albeit unsurprising--that the US is the most extreme low-context culture in Meyer's study, and I find this one of the most striking data points from her findings. It seems to explain much of the communication difficulties I've seen and experienced across cultural boundaries.
2. Evaluation Style (Negative Feedback)
Direct: Negative feedback is provided frankly, bluntly, honestly. Negative messages stand alone, not softened by positive ones. Absolute descriptors are often used ("totally inappropriate," "completely unprofessional") when criticizing. Criticism may be given to an individual in front of a group.
Indirect: Negative feedback to a colleague is provided softly, subtly, diplomatically. Positive messages are used to wrap negative ones. Qualifying descriptors are often used ("sort of inappropriate," "slightly unprofessional") when criticizing. Criticism is only given in private. (page 69)
My own experience in the US corresponds with our position in the middle of the spectrum, and I've found that a soft start helps a great deal when providing negative feedback in this culture.
3. Disagreement Style
Confrontational: Disagreement and debate are positive for the team or organization. Open confrontation is appropriate and will not negatively impact the relationship.
Conflict-Averse: Disagreement and debate are negative for the team or organization. Open confrontation is inappropriate and will break group harmony or negatively impact the relationship. (page 201)
I suspect that the US position in the middle of this spectrum reflects a national tendency to seek a balance between confrontation and harmony, and at the same time my experience as a professional and a coach makes clear that this varies widely across organizations and industries. I'm aware of professional settings in the US that are extremely confrontational and others that are just as conflict-averse.
4. Persuasive Style
Practical Applications: Individuals are trained to begin with a fact, statement, or opinion and later add concepts to back up or explain the conclusion as necessary. The preference is to begin a message or report with an executive summary or bullet points. Discussions are approached in a practical concrete manner. Theoretical or philosophical discussions are avoided in a business environment.
Conceptual Principles: Individuals have been trained to first develop the theory or complex concept before presenting a fact, statement, or opinion. The preference is to begin a message or report by building up a theoretical argument before moving on to a conclusion. The conceptual principles underlying each situation are valued. (page 96)
The emphasis on practical applications is consistent throughout much of US business culture, although in certain settings you can strengthen your point by noting the conceptual basis later (but rarely--if ever--up front.)
5. Source of Trust
Task-Accomplishment: Trust is based through business-related activities. Work relationships are built and dropped easily, based on the practicality of the situation. You do good work consistently, you are reliable, I enjoy working with you: I trust you.
Personal Relationships: Trust is built through sharing meals, evening drinks, and visits at the coffee machine. Work relationships build up slowly over the long term. I've seen who you are at a deep level, I've shared personal time with you, I know others well who trust you: I trust you. (page 171)
This finding of Meyer's was one of the most enlightening for me, perhaps because it used plain language to explain subtle social dynamics I've sensed but haven't fully understood. It was no surprise to learn that the US is the culture most focused on task accomplishment as a source of trust, and I see this as an all-too-common source of cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Notes
1) Modifications to Meyer's model
In this post I've re-ordered the sequence of the concepts from Meyer's book, changed some of the headings, and flipped a few of the endpoints to make a more consistent slide deck. (The page numbers cited are from Public Affairs' 2014 hardback edition.) I've cut out two concepts Meyer discusses, power distance and decision-making, because they were less relevant to my topic here, but I wrote about Hofstede's research on the former in 2008.
2) Additional work by Meyer
If you'd like to learn more about Meyer's work before reading her entire book, I highly recommend two of her HBR articles from 2014, Navigating the Cultural Minefield and One Reason Cross-Cultural Small Talk Is So Tricky. The latter makes the vivid distinction between "peach cultures" (like the U.S. and Brazil) and "coconut cultures" (like Germany and Russia), which Meyer credits to Trompenaars.
3) Limitations on use of national-culture data
When observing cultural tendencies at the national level, we need to be extremely careful about how we make use of this information. In The Ecological Fallacy in National Culture Research, Paul Brewer and Sunil Venaik of the University of Queensland offer an important cautionary note:
To assume that these national-level dimensions exist at the levels of individuals or organizations in a society is invalid and represents a form of "ecological fallacy..." The "ecological fallacy" is the error of assuming that statistical relationships at a group level also hold for individuals in the group. It is the error of inferring individual-level relationships from group aggregated data. [page 1064]
Brewer and Venaik go on to quote Hofstede himself:
Cultures are not king-size individuals: They are wholes and their internal logic cannot be understood in the terms used for the personality dynamics of individuals... [The cross-cultural dimensions] are meant to be a test of national culture, not of individual personality; they distinguish cultural groups or populations, not individuals. [page 1069]
They conclude by emphasizing the limitations on the utility of national-level data at the level of organizations and individuals:
Our analysis of the implications of the ecological fallacy makes meaningful interpretation of the national culture scores highly problematic, if not impossible... While there is not and probably never will be a consensus on the "right" approach to understanding the mix of social culture and organizations, we should at least recognize the complexity of the interplay of the two... [page 1078]
Broad, general characterizations of societies on national culture dimensions offer limited insights to managers about the characteristics of individuals, which is the level at which managers need and seek information about a country or society. Unfortunately, absence of such research by scholars has forced practitioners to take the easy, albeit wrong, path of simply using the national culture dimensions to characterize individuals, thus committing an [ecological fallacy]. [page 1080]
Given this analysis, my modest and provisional conclusion on how to make use of any data on national-level tendencies at the organizational and individual level is to proceed very cautiously. Attributing organizational or individual characteristics to national-level tendencies may be no different than any other form of stereotyping. Such attributions provide a reductive and insufficient explanation for our observations and minimize or ignore differences among organizations and individuals within a given national culture.
