MULTICULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS IN A MULTICULTURAL WORLD

MULTICULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS IN A MULTICULTURAL WORLD

Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

In Tapasya, academic journal from the Indira Group of Institutes, Jan 2006.

When a nasty ice storm hit the town of Radford, Virginia in the U.S.A. in a particularly bad winter in the mid-1990s, there was a power outage that lasted a week in some areas, while in some other neighbourhoods it was restored after a 24-hour blackout. Residents had no choice but to request friends in the luckier neighbourhoods to help out. Some of the Indian families who had recently moved to Radford to attend the university there approached their new, non-resident friends in desperately freezing conditions. It was a situation that demanded high level of socialization. The NRI couple welcomed them and said, “You may stay with us for as long as three days, so long as we share the groceries and utility bills.” The new residents were taken aback. It was their first experience of culture shock. “Back home,” they grumbled, “people would’ve been so different! We were going to buy groceries and pay for utilities anyway.”

Studies by McCroskey and Daly (1987) showed that whenever people find themselves in a setting where their culture is in a minority position, they must adapt to the majority group’s communication norms in order to be effective. Across countries the disparity would be enormous: North Americans tend to maintain some space between two speakers in an interpersonal encounter; in Indian and Arabic cultures, personal space is far less—even in business communication, and this can be often disconcerting to an American.

Organizing cultural realities. Organizations and societies are alike in that they both have constructed realities that we call “culture”. Culture is a set of shared meanings (Geertz, 1973). Communication of and in culture can be seen as a strategy. “Like scientific paradigms, elements of culture are used, modified, or discarded depending on their usefulness in organizing reality” (Peterson, 1979, p. 159). Organization and culture may be ideational, or cognitional. That is, as Lévi-Strauss (1971) suggests, cultures are shared symbolic systems that are “creations of the mind.”

Further, culture emphasizes performance. Culture is seen by some critics as a “system of competence”, wherein each individual operates with his/her own (mostly unconscious) theory of what his/her fellows know of, and believe in, the code being followed. Companies are trying to reinforce the quality factor to circumvent competition and enhance productivity. Let us examine how “communicating quality” can have momentous impact on productivity.

Between the Industrial Revolution and the Economic Revolution, there was a tentative shift from efficiency- to effectiveness-driven determinism. This new means endowed the employee with enhanced communication and decision-making opportunities. In this paradigm, much of the organizational communication is no longer a direct means to ccproduction: it is an end in itself, in creating a relaxed workplace atmosphere and nurturing interpersonal relationships among employees. Systems theorists posit that organizations control and coordinate people and resources through the process of interpersonal and group communication. Systems are made of sets of interdependent parts which function together to avoid entropy and are organized in hierarchical subsystems. Systems usually equal more than a sum of their parts. Human communication acts as an intangible force behind effectiveness in a system, something that the earlier (process-driven) organizational philosophy could not achieve. Therefore, the competence among employees to communicate at a social level is a new component among an organization’s requirements.

Culture and communication competence. Spitzberg (1994) notes that communication competence differs between cultures. This observation is relevant to our new approach to organizations as cultural corpuses. We shall examine what aspects would constitute effectiveness of communication competence. Arguably, the foremost aspect of quality communication is its carrier: the language. Everyday we see news headlines that proclaim: “Motorola claims that…”, “Microsoft says…”, “Infosys denies…”, and so on. The philosophical hallmark of such (carefully chosen) language is the recognition that today’s companies wish to be seen as corpuses, not as individuals, who make corporate decisions. (Scholars must, however, be careful before concluding, and corporations careful before pretending, that organizational hierarchy has disappeared.)

Language (as inextricable from culture, as Shapir and Whorf hypothesized) reflects and shapes corporate commitment. Gorden and Nevins, in their book, We mean business: Building communication competence in business and professions, describe corporate commitment as a strong belief in the goals and values of the organization, a willingness to devote considerable effort to belong to the organization. The celebrated researcher Geert Hofstede (1984) studied culture-specific organizational experiences in 40 countries—experiences that make up the fabric of those cultural units, and reported four representative dimensions that create the sense of belonging to a culture:

Interpersonal power distance (The extent to which inequalities are accepted and tolerated by superiors and subordinates)
Uncertainty avoidance (The extent to which people proactively gain certainty on issues)
Individualism/collectivism (The extent to which individuals or groups are the norm)
Masculinity/femininity (The extent to which traditional male values like assertiveness of self or traditional female values like caring are promoted)

Predictably, in Hofstede’s study, the two countries that appeared at two ends of the spectrum in the four dimensions were the United States and India, with Japan, Iran and other Eastern countries on the same end of the spectrum as India. Although organizational hierarchy is as pronounced and pyramidal in the United States as, if not more than, that in India or other countries, Hofstede found that Americans were less willing to “be bossed”. Similarly, Americans tolerate uncertainty to a much lesser extent than the Indians, Iranians or Japanese do. Americans belong to one of the most individualistic societies in the world. Indians are among the most collective. Americans were rated to be a moderately “masculine” society, that is, people value aggression and performance. The rating was most opposite in the Eastern countries, where social power structures pervade the corporate fabric, collectivism is high, and people are less aggressive. This contrast is now widely seen as an example of why Japan-U.S. joint ventures have consistently failed (e.g., Union Carbide, Singer, etc.). Interestingly, a recent scholar notes that virtual organizations are collectivist, that is, they 'recognize the value of collaboration and networking rather than relying on pure authority' or traditional bureaucracies (p. 7). (Collins, 2003)

We may argue that language use is a fifth dimension that can be added to the above four. Language use differs from culture to culture as it differs between organizations. Tomorrow’s organizations must define the language their corporations use. To illustrate this definition, consider how vastly different the meanings shared in the following two situations are. As the first example, a television news producer yells, “Go to camera 3!” In another instance, imagine a strategy meeting in a software company, with everyone in formal attire, using appropriately persuasive yet “corporate” tone, language and behaviour. Cleary, although the stated messages are different, the shared symbols and meanings are quite similar. If a software company employee were to defect to a news television channel, s/he would have to re-adapt fairly hastily to the friendly, if “rude”, environment. This pair of examples draws a close parallel with an intercultural situation.

Culture and the individual. Paradoxically, communication competence (or predictability) and its dialectical opposite, uncertainty, is frequently a function of training and documented communication in organizations. Such concretization results in better uniformity in derivation of meanings. According to Clinkscales and Walker (2003), a full understanding of the interplay between culture and organization cannot be had without diversity being a core value that dictates unearthing the cultural foundations of organizational form(s) (p. 241). Organizations today deliberately recruit nationwide to nurture such diversity. Understandably, though, diversity results in communicative uncertainty. Charles Berger suggests that communicative uncertainty can be overcome through strategies that may be “passive” (by observation), “active” (by manipulating the environment for further observation, e.g., by asking specific questions), or “interactive” (through interrogation and self-disclosure). Some researchers have seen the communication process as a dynamic development of ideas, or a productive movement towards social order, after which the interactants change in terms of information or relationship. Either way, communication brings about change.

Phenomenologists argue that individuals are developed by social and cultural contexts. They are active and volitional in shaping their own conduct as a result of interpersonal and group interaction. To that extent, the set of shared meanings derived from interactions in a cultural (or organizational) context is an outcome of individual meanings. In our other context, consequent to the new emphasis on quality, managers in organizations realize that they are asking a vital role-playing by the employee: an organizational role whose boundary with the personal is fading. At the cultural-organization interface, this facet poses a problem. For example, in the USA, employees like to keep their personal life separate from the office. In contrast, in Japan, organizational culture is embedded in social culture. Further, in Japan (as in India and other Eastern cultures), the individual is considered primarily in relation to and as a microcosm of the society; precious little exists outside social norms. In sum, it is vital that organizations themselves need to decide which culture they must adopt in order to facilitate communication competence among employees.

To reiterate that communication competence is really a situational, even individual, strategy, Spitzberg and Cupach (1994) add:

One of the ironies of … ideological assumptions [i.e., generalizations about communication competence] is that they seem to be based on the notion that what is “normal” is preferred, yet what is truly normal is far from the cultural ideal of good interpersonal relations … Relationships are considered “on track” if they are progressing toward intimacy and togetherness, ad are disintegrating, decaying … or dying if they are moving away from intimacy. Yet … closeness breeds undue influence, loss of identity, loss of privacy, frustrations of individual goals and personal projects, and the possibilities of great psychological and even physical harm … Closely related to this ideology is the presumption that openness and expressiveness are better than closedness and privacy.

Diversity and conflict. On the other hand, individualistic communication patterns may foster conflicts. “Too much consensus” may too often mean a lack of a balanced approach. Dyadic communication is an example of quick consensus in a frequently leaderless, powerless group interaction. On the flip side, dyadic communication is just as brittle due to the possibility that it can easily gravitate towards a dominating-submissive relationship. Too cohesive or too compliant groups do not fulfil the comprehensive objectives of organizational communication. Non-divergent thinking is most apparent, for example, in a typical entry-level interview situation, where the interviewer adopts a directive approach and controls the pace and direction of the interaction. Many of today’s recruiters have increasingly adopted a non-directive approach, therefore—where the focus is on mutual appraisal and mutual persuasion.

Organizational conflicts should constitute the crux of organizational development. Sociologists believe that the human (interpersonal) system is really a delicate balance of opposing forces. The onus on the organization’s leaders, therefore, is on ensuring a system that facilitates this balance through “substantive conflict” (one whose focus is the organization), and discouraging “affective conflict” (between personalities). Managers need to distinguish between destructive and constructive conflict. Functionalists contend that constructive conflicts occur all around us: through competitiveness in the free-market, through coffee-table discussions on which creative strategy is best. “Cultural divergency” (value differences between nations), Geert Hofstede (2003) argues, is the norm; cultural convergency (value similarities between nations) has not been evidenced over years. Indeed, he contends, diversity seems to have increased over the years (p. 238). Therefore, international organizations would do well to structure their cultural communication norms around this and other trends.

Discussion and conclusion. Predictably, diversity may foster divergence of ideas, and tomorrow’s organizations consciously promote platforms for such healthy conflict. Critical examination of conflict has invariably focused on its resolution. The foregoing sections in this paper have led us to the argument that organizational conflicts often do not need resolving, only managing. Ongoing cultural conflict (as opposed to issue-based conflict) maintains an organization’s critical balance in that it both allows individual expression as well as helps persuasion and change. Communication managers’ new strategic challenge is to achieve this balance.

The argument takes its roots in this paper itself. As a shared symbolic system, an organization often adopts communicative methods that are “ritualistic”. Each culture has ritualistic norms (ways of greeting, social ceremonies, etc). These activities are technically superfluous in reaching desired organizational ends. Many Western scholars of organizational communication—indeed, of communication itself—have treated ritualistic communication patterns as a familiarity process, and sometimes, as “uncertainty reducers” (Hofstede, 2003, p. 155). In fact, ritualistic form of communication is structurally different from “transmissional” communication in that while the latter is point-to-point, linear, message-oriented, the former is cyclical, nonlinear, and meaning-oriented. In ritualistic communication, which is native and primary to most Eastern cultures, meanings are derived from the entire process of communication, primarily the form and structure. Most Japanese and Indian firms practise this form of communication, even in formal meetings. While adopting this method, however, organizations must be cautious to triangulate it with transmissional communication, so that the content of the communication does not remain secondary. Further, ritualistic communication is non-confrontational by nature—it reduces uncertainty, and therefore, chances of conflict. If organizations must foster healthy conflict, ritualistic communication must be cleverly managed so that the symbolic systems of the organization are both ideational as well as cognitional.

Organizations that overemphasize the implementation of organizational culture, therefore, may often be forgetting that overbearing cultures tend to thwart communication and free flow of ideas. Scholars of culture studies (eg., Kaarsholm & James, 2000) posit that tools of communication are central to the definition of culture. This paper argues that if ritualistic communication is central to culture, it can frustrate creative, or ideational, communication. Hence, culture, by its definition of being the highest common factor of social (not individual) norms, discourages creative communication. Creative communication is the expression of intrapersonal communication, and organizations must bear in mind the critical rider of fostering individual communication competence through ideational communication. Thus, organizations must balance culture to ensure that it does not become a detriment to the very crux of their changing existence—creativity and communication.

Therefore, the argument in this paper is that the long-standing, normative implication that communication must used as a tool to overcome conflict is not suited to modern organizations. Substantive and constructive conflict is necessary to an organization whose primary cultural norm is to hire people from diverse cultural backgrounds, since it encourages such diversity. As such, our contention is valid only in case of conflict that organizations define as substantive and constructive. It would not be inappropriate to forward the approach that cultural diversity fuels substantive conflicts, while conflicts stemming from interpersonal differences could be of either affective or substantive. This paper does not empirically dwell upon the effects of specific cultural patterns on the process of cultural communication. Such a study would be an inductive goldmine. Future studies may also consider how symbolic systems embedded within organizations act, react and interact with each other, and either foster or deter informal forms of communication.
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