Birds eye view of how different cultures get work done
Business Insider published a great article summarizing “The Culture Map” in Jan 2015. They did a fabulous job showing how different cultures fit onto one of the 8 scales in the context of work.
- Communicating: low context (explicit, precise, clear) vs. high context (implicit, layered)
- Trusting: task based vs. relationship based
- Persuading: deductive (application first) vs. inductive (concept first)
- Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical
- Deciding: consensual vs. top down
- Scheduling: structured vs. flexible
- Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback
- Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoid confrontation
Nevertheless, the scales were shown individually.
I was curious whether there were relationships between the 8 scales to reveal macro trends.
I thought the conclusions were very interesting.
First things first: Methodology
Because of the lack of quantitative data, I force ranked the different countries on the 8 scales.
Unfortunately, many countries were not placed on all of the scales. For instance, China, India, and Japan were not on the persuading scale. Denmark and Mexico lacked a placement on the deciding scale. (Any takers here from those countries that can help me fill in the gaps? — Please leave a comment, I would really appreciate it!)
Due to the above limitation, I was only able to analyze the 8 countries that were on all 8 scales (US, Netherlands, Germany, UK, Brazil, Italy, France, and Russia).
Relationships between the scales
I really like the structure and level of detail that was given in The Culture Map. When looking at how the relationship ranks progress across the 8 different countries, I thought many of the conclusions matched intuition.
Low context environments
When a culture communicates in a low context environment (precise and clear), then it correlates well with the following characteristics.
- They tend to have trust based on task and consistent good work.
- They tend to persuade beginning with facts and statement focusing on application.
- The distance between leaders and subordinates is low.
- Decisions tend to be made by building consensus.
- Scheduling of tasks tend to follow a sequential, linear fashion.
Countries that fit well into this profile are US, Netherlands, UK, and Germany (with 1 exception — more about this later).
High context environments
The converse is true of cultures that communicate in a high context environment (layered and vague).
- They tend to have trust based on relationships.
- Persuade beginning with the concept and theory.
- The leadership style is hierarchical.
- Decisions tend to be made top down.
- Schedule remains flexible with an emphasis on adapting as changes arise.
Countries that fit well into this profile are Brazil, Italy, France, and Russia.
Top 4 of one characteristic remains in the top 4 of the entire collection’s characteristics
Although a country’s specific rank for each characteristic may swap, with 1 exception, the top 4 countries displaying any of the above characteristics also ranked top 4 in all of the other characteristics in the collection.
For example, US is ranked on the top for low context communication style, it also ranks top 4 in task based trust, deductive persuasion, egalitarian leadership, consensus based decision making, and linear scheduling.
The one exception that I eluded to is Germany/Brazil on the persuasion dimension. Germany is closer to concept first persuasion while Brazil tend to persuade starting with application.
Odd dogs: Evaluating and Disagreeing
These 2 dimensions are a little tricky — there is no strong correlation between them and the 6 other characteristics.
Nevertheless, when we isolate only these 2 characteristics, they correlate well with each other. When a culture is direct when giving negative feedback, they also tend to be confrontational when parties disagree. And when the culture is indirect when giving negative feedback, they also then to avoid disagreement.
Over to you
These are the top trends that I drew from data. From your experience, are my conclusions correct?
