Page 113 - Harnessing the Strengths

96 ■ Servant-Leadership in the Intercultural Practice

leader needs to be able to integrate both. Obviously, being
rational and expressing emotions are both important ele-
ments of functioning in life. For the servant-leader, which
approach will be accented depends, in part, on which cul-
ture he or she comes from. People from a “neutral” culture
place more value on the control of emotions in general, but
they have moments and outlets for expressing emotions—
for example, in Japan, during karaoke. In more “affective”
cultures, where life is lived with passion, the servant-leader
will have to look for more controlled processes.
In a neutral culture, it is generally accepted that openly
showing your emotions is improper, though this does not
mean that you are not allowed to have your emotions. It
simply means that the measure to which you express your
emotions publicly is limited. Neutral cultures accept feel-
ings and are aware of them, but keep them under control.
They interpret the loud and or exuberant signals of affective
cultures as “over the top” or too emotional. In neutral cul-
tures, being fl amboyant or too expressive lowers a person’s
prestige. The fact that a Japanese business partner tends to
limit his body language can make it more diffi cult for people
from affective cultures to understand what he is thinking.
Likewise, people from affective cultures often do not know
how to pick up the subtler signs of neutral cultures. Such
situations can lead to misunderstanding.
In an affective culture, people have no problem express-
ing their emotions. In such an environment, it is not nec-
essary to hide your opinions or feelings. In fact, doing so
is undesirable. Most people recognize that Italians, Span-
ish, Portuguese, and French are known to speak with their
hands as well as their words to get their point across.
We need to be very careful when we generalize about these
differences. People from neutral cultures are not cold and emo-