Culture is a broad term that has wide spectrum that has never been easy for us to understand thoroughly and master the concept perfectly due to the variant from every distinguish component that lead to the formation of a culture.
Define by ERC HR Insights Blog:
Culture is the character and personality of your organization. It's what makes your organization unique and is the sum of its values, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviours, and attitudes.
A culture that suit you can always motivates you to perform as you will appreciate what is being valued in that particular country or company and vice versa. Otherwise, situated in a culture that doesn't match your expectation and judgement might be a draining task to deal with. You could attempt to overcome the negative energy, yet being able to understand the suitability of one's culture could help you to avoid undesirable experience. For instance, can you adapt into the high pace and high intensity culture? If not, you will always easily burnout (esp if you have these symptoms)!
From business perspectives, the entity's culture will attract the right fit talent to the job, thus driving company's performance - capable candidates will achieve organization goals, and engagement - happy and satisfied employees boost retention. Nonetheless, prior drilling into the industry-aspects that affects a company culture, a broader guideline - the influences of varied country cultures that had on management/company's culture - could assist in filtering through the appropriate geographical or company's ownership that one would wish to kick start their career.
We have featured a snippet of a tool that use to navigate the cultural differences in a more systematic methods, which was developed by Erin Meyer, an American based in Paris who coaches executives in managing cross-cultural career moves. According to her research, Meyer identified 8 dimensions (communication, evaluation, leading, decision making, trust, disagreement, schedule and persuasiveness) which seems to capture the contributing factors to the cultural differences, and subsequently have compared numerous country culture in pair against those 8 dimensions. Below are 2 of Meyer's findings' excerpt: "
Common Ground
Both value step-by-step planning and
punctuality. Hard working and long work hours are viewed as pluses.
Differences
Japanese decision making is more
deliberate, consensual and hierarchical than American decision making. Also
Americans will hash out disagreements in team meetings while the Japanese
invest in nemawashi-
multiple one-on-one discussions that help them arrive at decisions before the
meeting, which is then used to formally adopt the decision.
Advice
Work toward combining the 2 styles. Hold nemawashi-like
discussions before meetings to work through disagreements in
private. Start meetings on time. Brainstorm and share opinions in the meetings,
but prep Japanese colleagues with meeting specifics beforehand so they are
prepared for debate. Structure the meeting dialogue by giving each person space
to speak one at a time rather than let a free-for-all take place.
Common Ground
Both show deference to the boss and avoid saying no to superiors. Both build trust through emotional bonds (Indians will weave this into the workday, while the Japanese socialize after hours)
Differences
Indian bosses made decisions quickly and may change them in response to new information. In Japan, decisions are made more slowly, through group consensus from the bottom up, and they tend not to change. In informal meetings, Indian colleagues often speak over one another, which demonstrates enthusiasm, but Japanese colleagues pause before responding to questions. In meetings, Indians are likely to do more of the talking than the Japanese.
Advice
Establish at the outset how decisions get made and how flexible they are. Make Indian managers aware that they speak English as fast as Americans, possibly too fast for their Japanese counterparts to follow. Many Japanese use drinking to forge connections, a concept jokingly called “nomunication” (from the Japanese verb nomu, to drink) A night out provides a great platform for sharing true inner feelings (called hone in Japanese) and forging important bonds."
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