Work Attitude Depends on the Country

The way that people think about work is well-anchored in their culture, a new article in Culture and Psychology in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science explains.

That is why one of the most important aspects of successfully running a multinational company is to ensure a managerial style according to the culture of each country.

If leaders do not insist on a certain pattern and they take into consideration the cultural environment their employees come from, they are sure to have a better working relationship between them.

The example given by Cristina B. Gibson, of the University of Western Australia, co-writer of the paper along with Dana M. McDaniel, of the University of California, Irvine, is the way that teamwork is perceived in different countries.

After interviewing people and gathering opinions, she managed to see more clearly the team concept everybody had.

She says that “in the United States, people used a lot of sports metaphors [and] elsewhere, that just wasn’t a common metaphor,” whereas in Latin America, teamwork was rather associated with family.

As families are constantly involved in your life and they celebrate with you socially, “if you just use those two contrasts and think about what you might expect from your family versus what you might expect from your sports team, you start to see the differences.”

Generally, the involvement in a sports team is more competitive and far less caretaking, thus more limited than for a family.

Another example given by Gibson was the perception of leadership, as many people assume that charisma is a good feature for a leader, because it inspires loyalty.

The reality is that what works for some might not work for others, as “the very same behaviors that are deemed desirable from a leader in one culture might be viewed as interference or micromanagement in other settings.”

The idea of this paper is that employers should never rely on assumptions and should always be careful and opened to the cultural habits of people from another country than theirs.

And as nowadays the tendency is toward globalization, people move a lot between countries and so cultures can vary a lot even within countries.

“We can’t make these assumptions that everybody in the United States is like this and everybody in China is like that,” Gibson ends, quoted by LiveScience.