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Going Forward: Cultural Paradoxes and a Caution 83 The ability to build such a deep, almost tacit understanding of a culture is rare. One of the goals of international firms is to develop such global mind-sets in managers throughout their firms. A global mind-set includes an openness to diversity along with an ability to pull ideas together across boundaries created by that diversity.30 This ability to synthesize across diversity requires a willingness to deal with complexity and can be enhanced through experiences in different cultures. A useful tool for figuring out what matters when working across cultures is the Map- Bridge-Integrate model (MBI) developed by Martha Maznevski and Joe DiStefano.31 MBI helps managers map cultural differences using a cultural framework and observations, then bridge them through communication, and finally integrate or manage them through participation, conflict resolution, and building on all ideas. MBI is linked with the global mind-set, since it is a tool that helps us synthesize across diversity boundaries. Mapping requires identifying the cultural differences that exist in the group and understanding them. It brings the group to a shared understanding of how diverse members see the world. Bridging requires communicating across these differences that have been identified in the mapping and building an awareness of shared values. The final step is to integrate, which requires managing the differences. This process values the differences among people, and then creates value from these differences. Study Smart and Improve Your Grades Go to http://bit.ly/SmartBookNOW Going Forward: Cultural Paradoxes and a Caution As your understanding of culture increases, you’ll encounter cultural paradoxes, or contradictions between the culture’s values you expect to see based on your use of the frameworks and your growing experience, and what you actually observe. Joyce Osland and Allan Bird have identified this phenomenon, and here are a few examples from their work. We review these paradoxes to help you anticipate how learning about cultures is a complex, intellectually challenging process, and that contradictions that may initially frustrate you are simply a part of moving forward. In fact, encountering them is a sign that you are making progress, that you are able to identify paradoxes and may be on your way to reconciling them. The first example has to do with U.S. culture, described as individualistic according to many frameworks; yet the United States has the world’s highest rate of charitable giving. The second example describes a phenomenon in in Costa Rica. People in Costa Rica, a high-context culture, regularly prefer automated tellers to real tellers because the automated tellers are polite. The final example describes behavior in Japan and the United States. Japanese have low tolerance for ambiguity while U.S. managers have high tolerance for it (Hofstede). Yet U.S. contracts are very specific, while the Japanese introduce ambiguous clauses. These three examples remind us that we are working with complex systems and our understanding lags reality. We close this section with a caution. Keep in mind that for all the frameworks we’ve described here, the score of each dimension represents a mean value for each country, its central tendency. In any culture you’ll find people who fit other points on the distribution curve than this mean value. The generalizations represented in the frameworks are at best sophisticated stereotypes32 of the complex cultures we are trying to understand. They are useful as first guesses; as predictions, however, they can mislead, because they ignore complexity and subtlety. Remember, too, that the researchers analyzed data at the national level, so the frameworks do not recognize the existence of subcultures. RULES OF THUMB FOR MANAGERS DOING BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES Knowing your customer is just as important anywhere in the world as it is at home. Each culture has its logic, and within that logic are real, sensible reasons for the way they do things. The manager who can figure out the basic pattern of the culture will be increasingly global mind-set Involves an openness to diversity along with an ability to synthesize across diversity LO 3-6 Discuss cautions for using cultural frameworks in business. cultural paradox Contradictions in a culture’s values


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