Читать книгу HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures (with featured article "Cultural Intelligence" by P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski) - Harvard Business Review - Страница 10

Adapting to a new culture involves overcoming obstacles and setbacks. People can do that only if they believe in their own efficacy. If they persevered in the face of challenging situations in the past, their confidence grew. Confidence is always rooted in mastery of a particular task or set of circumstances.

A person who doesn’t believe herself capable of understanding people from unfamiliar cultures will often give up after her efforts meet with hostility or incomprehension. By contrast, a person with high motivation will, upon confronting obstacles, setbacks, or even failure, reengage with greater vigor. To stay motivated, highly efficacious people do not depend on obtaining rewards, which may be unconventional or long delayed.

Hyong Moon had experience leading racially mixed teams of designers at GM, but when he headed up a product design and development team that included representatives from the sales, production, marketing, R&D, engineering, and finance departments, things did not go smoothly. The sales manager, for example, objected to the safety engineer’s attempt to add features such as side-impact air bags because they would boost the car’s price excessively. The conflict became so intense and so public that a senior manager had to intervene. Although many managers would have felt chastened after that, Moon struggled even harder to gain control, which he eventually did by convincing the sales manager that the air bags could make the car more marketable. Although he had no experience with cross-functional teams, his successes with single-function teams had given him the confidence to persevere. He commented, “I’d seen these types of disagreements in other teams, and I’d been able to help team members overcome their differences, so I knew I could do it again.”