Working with Cultural Differences

This title presents guidelines to benefit organisations working in culturally diverse business environments.Given the internationalisation of business, and the increasing need to work effectively with culturally diverse people in one's own country, people are facing new and more common challenges in [...]
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This title presents guidelines to benefit organisations working in culturally diverse business environments.Given the internationalisation of business, and the increasing need to work effectively with culturally diverse people in one's own country, people are facing new and more common challenges in developing workplace relationships. The challenges include communicating across differences in the use of silence and indirectness, dealing with negative exchanges, or neutral exchanges that one party perceives as negative, making decisions, working through criticisms and disagreements, and interpreting changing workplace dynamics. In this book, the author provides helpful guidelines for everyday intercultural interactions that have been gathered across the fields of cross-cultural psychology, organisational behaviour and intercultural communication.The author uses actual examples he calls "critical incidents" to illustrate the basic psychological processes that play a part in effective, and ineffective, intercultural relationships across workplaces.The differences faced include individual and collective cultural backgrounds, the relative emphasis placed on the importance of status and power, behaviours relative to a culture's social norms, and gender expectations of males and females in the workplace. The insights provided allow readers to understand how they can benefit from, rather than be frustrated by, intercultural experiences, and how to better develop such relations. Short stories throughout the text demonstrate how actual people in business recognised and dealt with intercultural issues, at home and abroad.