Culture Shock and Poor Adjustment - Essay Example

?PART ONE: Literature Review Culture Shock and Poor Adjustment Globalization is fostering cultural changes and is reshaping the thinking modes of people all over the world. Although this has created a lot of room for the clash of cultures, yet there also exist ways in which different cultures can inspire one another, learn from one another, and appreciate their commonalities as well as differences (Soderberg and Holden, 2002). National culture, in such an increasingly globalized world, is a constraint on the practice of management. Gerhart (2008) found that such visualization of the national culture has either become increasingly inconsistent with the empirical evidence or there is lack of sufficient empirical work on it. For example, when the national culture plays the role of a constraint on management, the differences of cultures within countries are small in comparison to the differences between them. However, the lack of evidence in support of this assumption imparts the need for the cross cultural management research to advance differently (Gerhart, 2008). This literature review tends to explore the complications faced by organizations as they tend to internationalize in general and the challenges posed by culture shock and poor adjustment in particular in light of the case study of the UK based telecommunication organization that is planning to internationalize. The discussion can be put into perspective by considering the altering trends in the pantheon of cultural research. In the 19th century, the problem of cultural group independence was introduced for the first time by Sir Francis Galton in his work over correlation (Bird and Fang, 2009, p. 139). Galton stated that the cultural groups could not be considered entirely independent of each other because of the strong relationships created by the processes of cultural transfusion. As a result, the focus of research became cultures in toto and little work was done to draw comparisons across cultures. During the 1950s, the cultural change had attracted a lot of scholarly attention which led to the evolution of cultural ecology as a response to the natural environment (Steward, 1955). During the 1970s, there occurred rapid theoretical development in the field of anthropology’s cultural research. Keesing (1974) differentiated between the ideational theory of culture in which culture is visualized as the structural, symbolic, and cognitive systems, and the ecological theory of culture in which culture is visualized as an adaptive system. Efforts were made to deal with the complex matter of culture by “cutting . . . the culture concept down to size…[into] a narrowed, specialized, and…theoretically more powerful concept” (Geertz, 1973, p. 4). In order to understand the effect of internationalization of the telecommunications organization that is currently based in the UK, there is need to explore the country differences in the culture of organizations. “The effect size of country at the individual and organization levels, while not expected to be the same, is expected to be related, if it is accepted that differences in individual level characteristics (e.g. cultural values) of organizational members do, to some degree, translate into organization level differences in culture” (Gerhart, 2008, p. 264). Nelson and Gopalan (2003) conducted a large-scale multi-country research to measure the organization culture. To achieve this, they collected the data of a total of 288 organizations based in three countries with very different cultures i.e. India, the United States, and Brazil. The researchers first obtained the organization culture profiles for each of the three countries and then determined the extent to which the cultures complied with the national culture profiles for the countries from which the organizations were selected. Nelson and Gopalan (2003) found that the culture of 79 per cent of the organizations was not isomorphic with their respective national cultures of the countries. Another research on the country based differences in the organization culture was carried out by the GLOBE team of researchers (House et al., 2004) who made use of the data retrieved from 208 organizations located in 27 different countries. According to the GLOBE team of researchers, a country accounted for 23 per cent of the total variance in the practices of the organizational culture and this medium bordered on big, effect size. Both of the studies generate very different effect sizes. Nevertheless, country could not explain the cause of 77 per cent variance in the organization culture even in the GLOBE study. The country effect is an upper bound upon it instead of being a national culture effect. Cultural intelligence plays a very important role in the integration of workforce in a foreign culture and is defined as a system of interlinked skills and knowledge that interact with the help of cultural metacognition which enhances people’s tendency to select, shape, and adapt to their environment’s cultural aspects. This definition of cultural intelligence places the construct in the intelligence’s multifaceted conceptualizations domain. Outcome of the culturally intelligent behavior, by definition, is effective intercultural interaction. Such effectiveness can be described with the help of the expatriate adjustment literature and the literature about successful integration into foreign cultures. These forms of literature have explained several traits of effective intercultural interaction. According to Thomas et al. (2008), the effective intercultural interaction is characterized by good personal adjustment, development of good relationships with people belonging to different cultures, and the effective obtainment of the task-related goals. Cultural intelligence can be expected to have an affirmative relationship with the expatriate adjustment, informed decision making tendency in a culturally diverse setting, and administration of cross cultural interactions and leadership of a culturally diverse workforce on the basis of the dimensions of outcome related to self, relation, and effectiveness of task as defined by Thomas et al. (2008). People belonging to different countries have their own individualistic cultural norms and values that can have many implications for the organizational personnel that are internationalizing. India is one of the countries with a very strong culture of its own that is different from the European culture in many ways. The Indian mindset is captured by the constructs of anarchical individualism and Brahmanical idealism. The Indian mindset has many implications on the Indian negotiating behavior dynamics. The Brahmanical idealism projects the decision makers’ ability to identify the best solution. “Any discrepancies between the realities of the external world and the logic of the inner world as manifested through a search for the ideal solution are not problematical for it is only the inner world that defines the true reality” (Kumar, 2004, p. 39). The anarchical individualism focuses upon the primacy of obtaining the best solutions with the help of absolutist kinds of interpersonal behavior given the Brahmanical idealism places emphasis on the mental world’s purity. However the attainment of the ideal solution is complicated since all people are involved in locating the ideal solution and their ideal solutions are usually equally good or bad as compared to others’. Cooperative behavior is not easily attainable in such conditions. The anarchic individualism fragments and draws the energy out of the system instead of enhancing the total effort. The dimensions of Indian negotiating behavior are explained by anarchical individualism and Brahmanical idealism. On one hand, there are high levels of aspiration amongst the Indian negotiators that is required to attain favorable outcomes. On the other hand, such negotiating behavior leads to difficulties in the interaction between the Indian workers and the foreign workers particularly when the cooperation has to play a fundamental role in negotiating with an outside party. This combination poses hurdles and introduces complications in the negotiations between the Indian negotiators and the foreign negotiators since the foreign negotiators cannot accurately gauge whether the negotiation would lead to a conflict or successful resolution of the issues. The Indian negotiators tend not to give up since they are sensitized to such interaction patterns. “Nationally influenced behavioral characteristics become an ingrained part of each company’s “way of doing things” and shape its international structure and processes” (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1998, p. 48). The tendency of culture shock to have potential negative implications for an organization is maximized when the organization moves into a new setting with little, if any, awareness of its own limitations and unrealistic expectations of the new culture’s demands. The frustration and overwhelming confusion that are essential components of culture shock might be perceived as an unknown crisis of the mental health or a severe personal problem on the part of the workforce moving into the new culture. The basic necessity of successful integration of an organization into a foreign culture and successful internationalization of the business is the development of respect, understanding, and harmony with the culture of the host country. Before exposing the workers to the international environment, the management of the telecommunication organization should introduce them to the existence and importance of culture shock and the complications in adjustment posed by it so that the workers may be able to avoid the misunderstandings in the foreign culture and optimize on their potential to integrate into the foreign culture. The telecommunication organization should keep these challenges in mind and prepare for them to have successful internationalization. PART TWO: Recommendations for Overcoming Cross Cultural Challenges From the literature review, a vast range of coping strategies with the culture shock can be identified that include but are not limited to development of the cultural self-awareness, information giving, isomorphic attribution, training in social skills, and experiential training or learning by doing (Bochner, 1986; Brislin et al., 1986; and Furnham, 1993). 1. Creating awareness of the existence and unavoidability of culture shock The first step that the telecommunication organization should take for having minimal adverse effects of culture shock and making it easier for the organization to integrate into the new cultures is the realization that culture shock is a commonly experienced outcome of internationalization and cannot be avoided. The mere realization that the stress is time-limited, commonly experienced, and quite natural to occur has therapeutic effects on the organizational personnel. As a result, the workers’ hope and level of confidence is raised and having realized that the process is time-consuming, the organization thus starts dealing with the new culture step by step in an organized way. The management of the telecommunication organization should tend to find a common solution to develop mutual understanding and simply the demanding and intricate process of acting in a variety of cultural conditions. Such helpful steps do not imply that the workers of the telecommunication organization should leave all aspects of their indigenous cultural background. Instead, the workers should use their own culture’s knowledge to develop their awareness about the culture of the host countries. It is not very difficult for the workers to sacrifice aspects of their culture that are not very important, though this behavior carries a lot of weight in view of the foreign culture. Management of the telecommunication organization can inculcate the knowledge of the culture shock in the best way by describing the process of assimilation to the workers. Management of the telecommunication organization should introduce the process of assimilation with the host culture particularly to the workers that are required to function in the environment of the host culture for a long time. Weber and co. (1998) consider the process of assimilation as quite same for many workers functioning in a range of multicultural conditions and describe it as comprising four fundamental phases that are discussed as follows: a) Observation phase The observation phase commences as the workers of the telecommunication organization arrive into the host culture. In a vast majority of cases, the observation phase happens without significant problems because most of the things are prearranged and the accepting organization pays a lot of attention toward the worker. In the observation phase, the workers develop new contacts both with the members of the host culture and with the members of the same country i.e. the UK in the case under consideration. Workers during the observation phase obtain a considerably positive impression. b) Collision phase The problems start to surface for the first time during the collision phase of the process of assimilation. In this phase, the new colleagues are found to be not quite as reliable in certain situations as they were perceived by the organizational personnel to be in the start. In the collision phase, making contacts with new people becomes more difficult particularly beyond the context of work than it was in the observation phase. Workers start to develop a critical behavior toward the host culture, and this is when culture shock starts to become strong. The collision phase is indeed a critical phase and the usual duration for which it persists is between two and six months. The level of uncertainty of the workers raises which in effect brings a decline in the level of self-confidence of the workers, particularly when the demands and expectancy on their efficiency are increasing at the same time. The risk of termination of the workers’ stay in the host culture is maximal during the collision phase. They experience the culture shock in terms of their emotional reaction that happens as a result of loss of the familiar culture. The stressful situations whose level of severity and intensity varies with the tendency of the workers to strongly perceive the cultural departure. c) Consolidation phase Consolidation phase is the third phase of the process of assimilation and in this phase, the workers recover from the crisis experienced during the collision phase in case they are able to draw a balance after the collision phase. The workers consistently keep adapting to the host culture’s conditions in terms of improvement in the competence of language of the host culture and identification of the causes for which the other individuals behave in different ways. Ideally, the system of relationships becomes stable during the consolidation phase and their own ideas start becoming the possible alternatives of the measures’ evaluation. d) Departure phase The departure phase is the last phase of the process of assimilation and commences with the workers’ preparation of return to their home-country from the foreign country. During this phase, an uncertainty appears regarding the future of the workers’ personal life as well as the professional career. The workers understand that the behaviors developed as a result of their stay in the host country would be lost upon their return to the home-country. As a result of this realization, their satisfaction and balance get lower and pass through a stage of contra-cultural shock. 2. Development of competence in foreign language The second very important element that the telecommunication organization should take seriously and work upon to ensure smooth transition into the international market is development of the workers’ competence in the language that is spoken in the culture the organization plans to move in. Developing competence in language is one of the most fundamental pre-requisites of easy adjustment in a new culture. One of the main ways in which the culture shock might act for the telecommunication organization is induction of the stressors in the workforce of not being understood in the host culture. To enhance the workers’ competence in the language of the host culture, the management of the telecommunication organization should start a program of language training for the workforce. The local ethnic community’s support systems can be of invaluable help and assistance to the workers of the telecommunication organization. This liaison role has been elaborated by Kim (1988) who advocated “the merging of ethnic and host team social service delivery” (Kim, 1988, p. 171). Only by developing the competence in language can the organizational personnel understand the complicated negotiating behaviors of members of the host society e.g. the Indian negotiating behavior that was discussed in the first part. 3. Encouraging interaction between organizational personnel and members of the host culture The workers need to be encouraged to frequently interact with the members of the host culture and develop competence in their language by learning directly from them. Ideally, the training sessions should be more than just focusing on the development of competence in language. Information giving should also be a fundamental element of the training sessions. Information giving, as the term implies, is the transfer of information generally about facts of the host culture to the learners. This can be achieved by educating the workers with the help of training sessions based on films and lectures. Apparently, it appears to be an effective strategy in that it is efficient, cheap, advanced, and consistent, yet the implications also include theoretical understandings for the learning process and also the preferred styles of learning. The importance of learning by doing in this manner cannot be emphasized. According to Furnham (1993), the shared information is too general and is likely to project the belief that a culture can be learned in some lessons (Furnham, 1993, pp. 97-98). This imparts the need of providing the workers with frequent opportunities of interaction with members of the host culture so that they can get a first-hand account of the fundamentals of the host culture. “As we come in contact with people from other cultures, we become aware of our uniqueness and begin to appreciate our differences. In interacting with foreigners, we learn to recognize and value our fundamental humanity – our cultural similarities and dissimilarities” (Adler and Gundersen, 2008, p. 35). Cultural self-awareness includes exchange of information as well as of opportunities of drawing comparison and contrast between different cultures. Such training makes use of discussion as a format. The objective is to enhance the awareness of people of the values of their own culture as well as of the host culture. According to Brislin et al. (1986), this is essentially an opportunity to “stimulate an expansion of people’s thinking” (Brislin et al., 1986, p. 22). The management should encourage connections between the organization’s workers and other people belonging to the same culture i.e. the culture of the UK in this case, who have had the experience of culture shock in the past. Three recommendations to reduce culture shock and poor adjustment and to facilitate the telecommunication organization’s internationalization include creating awareness of the existence and unavoidability of culture shock, development of competence in foreign language, and encouraging interaction between organizational personnel and members of the host culture. The recommendations made in this paper can be used in contact with the workers and organizations belonging to different cultures functioning in both the foreign and the local environment. References: Adler, N 2008, International Dimensions of Organizational Behaviour, Thomson South-Western. 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