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Liberty, equality, reality

PUBLISHED : 15 Jul 2010 06:25:59 | Anthony Sibillin

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In mid-2008, 2000 German electricians descended on the Toulouse, France, assembly plant of European aircraft manufacturer Airbus. Their mission was to fix wiring problems delaying commercial production of the A380 superjumbo, the world’s biggest passenger aircraft. However, loose cables were soon the least of the Germans’ problems, as 1500 French hosts, grumpy about their presence, openly displayed their feelings.

T-shirt-clad locals had taken one look at buttoned-down foreign colleagues and decided they were not like them. “We shout a lot,” French team leader Jean-Pierre Guizerix told a newspaper at the time. “At the beginning, the Germans were very surprised by the way we work. They need everything written down. We just work it out as we go.”

German team leader Hannes Mechler agreed the two groups worked very differently. “We don’t shout. It is not the German way,” he said, noting how his French colleagues kissed one another in a very non-Teutonic morning greeting.

Seemingly trivial, such differences can delay not only aircraft, but any business that requires people from different national and cultural backgrounds to work together, says Graham Jordi, executive general manager of SMARTS Market Surveillance. In exporting the Sydney-based company’s surveillance software to brokers and exchanges in 30 countries, Jordi has learned from direct experience that “it’s often the small things that make a difference”.

“Different cultures, for instance, have different concepts of time,” he says. “From something as seemingly trivial as the importance or not of punctuality, through to broader concepts such as agreed schedules for delivery.”

Like the Airbus workers, Jordi has also observed a difference in “the degree to which agreements or discussions need to be committed to writing, or the commitment that is given to verbal assurances”.

“It may be absolutely necessary and expected in some cultures to ensure discussions are properly documented, while in others the request to do so needs to be carefully phrased so as not to offend,” he says.

Financial as well as psychological rewards await managers who can dismantle cultural barriers and establish trust between different parts of their organisation, as well as between staff and customers, a senior lecturer in management at the University of Queensland Business School, Nicole Gillespie, says.

“At the organisational and corporate level, empirical evidence indicates that the level of internal trust in large publicly listed companies ... results in increased market valuation and financial performance,” she and a colleague wrote in a contribution to Organisational Trust: A Cultural Perspective, a collection of essays Gillespie also co-edited.

Between organisations, too, more co-operation and information sharing as a result of greater trust can reduce costs and increase profits, she notes. “Trust is held to be a major contributor to organisational competitiveness because it cannot be easily imitated or replicated.”

Indeed, for many firms, new business realities are moving trust-making from the strategic category of competitive advantage to that of core competence. The first of these realities is the dismemberment of organisations into smaller units that can be located wherever local conditions are most advantageous. As a result, more firms are finding themselves in joint ventures and alliances with foreign partners, or negotiating contracts and sales with overseas suppliers and customers.

A second is the spread of email, video-conferencing and other communication technologies. These allow managers to form global teams of individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

A third factor is the rise of China, India, Brazil and Russia. Australian managers are less familiar with the business cultures of these emerging economic powerhouses, compared with those of the North American and European countries that dominated during the 20th century.

The mobility of talent is also moving trust-making up the list of management priorities, since it means that even managers of companies with no overseas presence can end up overseeing a diverse workforce.

Mark Saba is one of a growing number of cross-cultural experts available to help firms deal with the challenges these situations present. The founder and managing director of Melbourne-based Connect Language Services warns that writing down and distributing well-meaning diversity policies is not enough.

“It is about the individual manager, even though you might have the policies in place,” he says. “They need to understand what trust means to the cultures they are working with.”

Saba finds helpful the five dimensions of culture first explained by Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede. The prominence of these dimensions – which include tolerance of unequal power, individualism, dominance of masculine values, avoidance of uncertainty, and the orientation of people to the long term – varies widely from country to country (see table, below).

For example, individualistic Australians do not like some having all the power, are comfortable with ambiguity but focused on the short-term, according to ratings compiled by Hofstede.

By contrast, the more collectively minded Chinese are OK with power elites, even more OK than Australians with uncertainty but oriented to the long term.

These differences, once acknowledged, can help guide the way Australian managers approach, say, Chinese suppliers, customers and government officials.

For instance, managers may have to go to the top of a Chinese organisation for a definitive answer, as those lower in the hierarchy are less likely than in Australia to be delegated authority to make decisions. Australian managers should also be careful to show respect for age and wisdom, and avoid doing anything that would cause a Chinese business partner to lose face.

Of course, Hofstede’s dimensions and countless other categorisations of national business cultures should be used as rough guides only to behaviour. As Saba notes, even countries with broadly similar business cultures, such as Australia and the United States, can differ in subtle but important ways. For example, he has noted that relationships with Australians need to be actively maintained, whereas Americans are more accepting of irregular contact from colleagues and partners.

Moreover, individuals may differ from their cultural stereotype in important ways. The mannerisms of an urban Chinese business person might be more similar to those of a Melburnian than to a rural worker in the Asian country’s far west.

Even Airbus’s French and German contingents eventually found a way to get A380s rolling off the production line, suggesting that a combination of time, perseverance and deadlines can overcome the sharpest cultural tensions.

What nations value: Cultural Dimensions Index

Country/region	Power inequality	Individualism	Masculinity	Uncertainty avoidance	Long-term orientation
Arab world	80	38	52	68	n/a
Australia	36	90	61	51	31
Brazil	69	38	49	76	65
China	80	20	66	30	118
East Africa	64	27	41	52	25
France	68	71	43	86	n/a
Germany	35	67	66	65	31
India	77	48	56	40	61
Indonesia	78	14	46	48	n/a
Japan	54	46	95	92	80
New Zealand	22	79	58	49	30
United Kingdom	35	89	66	35	25
United States	40	91	62	46	29

* Higher scores indicate the cultural dimension is more pronounced in that country. Source: Geert Hofstede

BRW

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