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Differences and difficulties in intercultural management interaction 273

2.3. Question 3
Question 3. What are the difficulties that are reported by managers but are not
predictable on the basis of the classical, contrastive studies?
The German managers reported the informality and the use of humour by
their British colleagues (cf. Marra and Holmes in this volume) as difficulties
they experienced in their interaction, behaviours not predicted by Hofstede or
Hall. For their part, the British managers reported the formality, surnaming and
use of titles by their German colleagues as difficulties. All these features were
among those mentioned by both British and German managers as differences.
One further difficulty reported by the German managers understandably re-
mains unpredicted and unexplained by the major contrastive studies and this con-
cerns what has been described in the table above as ‘lack of lingua franca skills’
(cf. Meierkord in this volume). The German managers reported that their British
colleagues were unable or unwilling to take account of the fact that they (the Ger-
man managers) did not have a native-speaker competence in English and did not
adjust their use of their mother tongue to the lower level of competence in Eng-
lish of their German colleagues. For example, one German manager noted of his
British colleagues: ‘The English aren’t always sympathetic to Germans when
they speak English. To begin with, the English speak slowly, but then fall back
into speaking the same speed and slang as if the listener is a native’.
These comments are typical of those made by German managers about
Anglo-German interaction and are also recorded in other studies, e.g. Knapp
(1998). This observation is also frequently made by managers of other national-
ities who are not native speakers of English about their interaction with British
and American colleagues in international management. Indeed, in complex con-
flict situations such as takeovers, assessment interviews or difficult client-sup-
plier negotiations this lack of understanding may be seen as a deliberate attempt
to put the non-native party to the communication at a disadvantage (Knapp
1998: 185).

2.4. Question 4

Question 4. Can the difficulties experienced be explained more accurately by
reference to insights from other studies which have received less attention than
Hofstede, Trompenaars, Hall etc?
A more complete prediction of the difficulties reported on both sides (and
also the explanation of those unexplained by conventional wisdom in the tables
above) would have been achieved by an examination of the Kulturstandards or
culture standards for Germany established by Thomas (2003), Schroll-Machl
(2002a, 2002b, 2003), and complemented by those for Britain observed by
Schmid (2003).