Cross-Cultural Communication in a Globalized World

Introduction: Globalization and Cultural Integration

Globalization's effect on cultures continues to rapidly force the integration of often widely divergent countries and regions together in the pursuit of common objectives, whether they are commercial or non-profit in scope. As companies partner with one another based on the potential of gaining competitive advantages in global markets, the pressure for people from widely divergent cultures to quickly assimilate with each other and accomplish shared objectives grows. The rapid increase in joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, and shared-risk business models accelerates the need for intercultural and international communication (Sirkin, Hemerling, & Bhattacharya, 2008).

The intent of this paper is to analyze how cultures—both within organizations and within nations—are being changed by the rapid pace of change attributable to globalization (Sirkin, Hemerling, & Bhattacharya, 2008). While social networking and Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly being used to bridge the physical gaps between work teams (Bernoff & Li, 2008), significant gaps remain in how cross-cultural teams perceive each other. These perceptions need to be made more congruent through dialogue and an appreciation for how subcultures have unique communication requirements (Yankelovich, 1999). The internal and external forces that impact cultures are making ethnocentrism more noticeable given the urgency to assimilate teams from widely different cultures and quickly attain shared business objectives (Marques, Dhiman, & King, 2009). Navigating this new global landscape of cultures requires a set of concepts and frameworks.

Setting the Foundation for Intercultural Dialogue

Of the many frameworks that can be used for determining the level of congruency—or lack thereof—between cultures, the Cultural Dimensions Model (Hofstede, 1998) has been pervasively adopted and cited by well over 500 additional empirical studies according to Geert Hofstede (1998). Using the five cultural dimensions, variations between cultures can be quantified and analyzed to determine the best possible strategies for enabling greater dialogue and communication.

The five cultural dimensions include the Power Distance Index (PDI), which indicates how willing or accepting members of organizations—both social and professional—are to accept power being distributed unequally. To the extent that members of a society accept a high PDI, they are more likely to prefer hierarchical, highly structured organizations with very clear lines of authority and definitions of status and roles. The PDI also indicates how prevalent acceptance of inequality is across cultures. These are invaluable insights for determining how to create a communication strategy with someone from another culture.

The second cultural dimension, Individualism (IDV), measures a culture's propensity to form tight groups or maintain a strong collectivist mindset, relative to a strong individualist approach characterized by loosely defined connections throughout a group. Strong individualist societies—including the United States—focus on ensuring the immediate family is taken care of, whereas collectivist societies are more focused on the entire group or extended family. In terms of dialogue and the ability to attain levels of trust across cultures, knowing a given country's level of individualism versus collectivism is vitally important. Creating empathy and a shared sense of observation, perception, and perspective is critically important for dialogues across cultures to be successful (Yankelovich, 2007).

Additional cultural dimensions include how roles within a culture are assigned by gender—the delineation of Masculinity (MAS) versus femininity. Analysis of the MAS index shows that women have a higher level of congruity over perceptions of role-based values compared to men, who have significantly different perceptions of their roles, even among themselves within a given culture (Hofstede, 1998). Consider the challenge of creating a multinational team that allows men to hold leadership locally in a culture with a high MAS score while being subordinate to a woman in the United States. The need for careful dialogue and the development of scenarios that allow organizational culture to account for varying perceptions of roles is critical (Zhang & Tansuhaj, 2007). This would certainly be the case for any organization creating a virtual development team of engineers from Japan—which has a MAS score of 95—reporting to women in the U.S. Conversely, the countries of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, with some of the lowest MAS scores, would find these working arrangements in a virtual team amenable and easily adapted to.

Two additional measures in the Cultural Dimensions Index are the Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) and Long-Term Orientation (LTO). UAI is a measure of risk aversion in a culture, and LTO defines the perspective of time itself within a culture. Not surprisingly, China leads all nations included in the index in LTO, as its culture greatly values the ordering of relations and the defining of status over time.

Conclusion

Nurturing this trust over time takes repeated and frequent use of dialogues (Yankelovich, 1999) that serve to compensate for the perceptual differences between cultures, as illustrated through the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions Model. The need for creating strategies of communication and perception validation across working groups is critically important to overcome ethnocentrism and fuel trust.