Page 299 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Differences and difficulties in intercultural management interaction 277

The difficulties the German and British managers report can be seen to occur
particularly when these culture standards do not merely differ but actually clash
(German rule orientation vs. British pragmatism, British indirect communi-
cation vs. German directness of communication). Clearly, cultural differences
alone are not necessarily difficult for both parties to the communication to
handle in the interaction. Some people may find differences merely interesting
or curious rather than problematical or threatening. It seems that it is when cul-
ture standards actually contradict each other that difficulties are reported. This is
not surprising given the behaviour-regulating function that Thomas attributes to
culture standards. When culture standards are in contradiction to each other, a
member of one culture is confronted with ways of thinking and behaving which
are directly contrary to what is regarded in his/her own culture as normal, typi-
cal and binding and which if manifested there would result in rejection.
Large differences in value orientations, such as Hofstede’s five dimensions
(i.e. low/high power distance, low/high uncertainty avoidance, individualism/
collectivism, masculinity/femininity, long-/short-term orientation) naturally
may also impact on behaviour and lead to difficulties in interaction but the more
clearly behaviour-oriented, less abstract nature of culture standards, their
greater number and their generation from critical interaction make the culture
standards approach particularly useful in the culture-specific training situation,
where an understanding of potential difficulties is more useful than an under-
standing of mere differences.
The objection may be raised that the culture standards approach, rather like
the maxim approach in politeness theory, may lead to the ascertaining of a large
and unmanageable number of culture standards, something which does not pos-
sess the elegance of Hall’s, Hofstede’s or Trompenaars’ work, which enables
many cultures to be described and contrasted using a limited and thus manage-
able number of concepts. To counter this objection, three observations can be
made.
Firstly, the elegance of Hall’s, Hofstede’s or Trompenaars’ approaches is de-
ceptive in that, although they may offer a contrastive description of a large
number of cultures according to a small number of concepts, the description of
individual cultures which emerges is far from comprehensive. Still less do they
offer a description of the differences between individual cultures, things which
Thomas’s approach does. Hofstede (1994: 252), for example, admits: “Statisti-
cal handling of the data (…) produced the four dimensions described (…) The
four together account for 49% of the country differences in the data, just about
half. The remaining half is country specific: it cannot be associated with any
worldwide factor, at least not in the data I had”. This accounts for the small
number of dimensions and the resulting incompleteness of the picture yielded
by Hofstede’s approach for describing an individual culture and the differences
between it and another culture or cultures.