Page 294 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

272 Peter Franklin

The Germans reported that their British colleagues differed from themselves
in their lack of structure in their management activity, a behaviour indicative of
low uncertainty avoidance, and in their indirectness, a property associated with
high-context communication.
However, further differences were noted by the German managers which
would not be predicted by Hofstede’s and Hall’s work. These differences
concerned the occurrence of humour and informality. A typical observation was
‘I do not address my boss by his/her first name’. A further difference noted was
the fact that their British colleagues were – unsurprisingly – English-speaking
but generally monolingual.
These predicted and reported differences are listed in the second and third
columns of Table 2, their possible causes in the fourth column.
In short, the conventional wisdom did not predict all the differences ob-
served by the managers in this case study.

2.2. Question 2
Question 2. Do the differences described by the contrastive studies predict and
explain the difficulties in intercultural management interaction?
When asked to describe the difficulties in communicating and cooperating
with their German colleagues, the British managers mentioned only two fea-
tures of management behaviour which are also described by the contrastive
studies, namely, their process-orientation and, related to this, the importance of
planning, both features associated with higher uncertainty-avoidance. One man-
ager noted, for example, ‘[my German colleagues] have rigid rules with a pro-
cess to follow to achieve the required outcome’.
The equivalent question asked of the German colleagues also yielded two
difficulties which could be predicted on the basis of the contrastive studies. The
first was the lack of process-orientation in the behaviour of their British col-
leagues, a feature associated with low uncertainty-avoidance. Typical observa-
tions were, ‘For the Germans, once something is agreed it is written in stone.
For the British, changes are always possible’. The second difficulty predictable
from Hall’s work on differences in communication style, namely indirectness,
was also reported as a difficulty by the German managers, a typical observation
being ‘Britons often say what they mean between the lines, which from a Ger-
man perspective is difficult to understand’.
The case study would suggest that difficulties can be predicted to a certain
but incomplete extent. It was especially the case for the British managers that
many of the differences predicted by the contrastive studies were not reported as
being problematical.