Читать книгу Going Abroad 2014 - Waldemar A. Pfoertsch - Страница 15

Although you think that the major obstacle in international business is to understand the foreigner, the greater difficulty involves becoming aware of your own cultural conditioning. As anthropologist Edward Hall has explained, “What is known least well, and is therefore in the poorest position to be studied, is what is closest to oneself.” You are generally least aware of your own cultural characteristics and are quite surprised when you hear foreigners’ descriptions of you. For example, many Germans are surprised to discover that they are seen by foreigners as well-educated, punctual, disciplined… A Newsweek survey reported the characteristics most and least frequently associated with Americans:

Another very revealing way to understand the norms and values of a culture involves listening to common sayings and proverbs. They tell you what a society recommends and what it avoids. For example does the American proverb Early to bed, early to rise, makes one healthy, wealthy and wise indicate the values of diligence and work ethic whereas the proverb There’s more than one way to skin a cat indicates originality and determination.

To the extent that you can begin to see yourself clearly through the eyes of foreigners, you can begin to modify your behavior, emphasizing your most appropriate and effective characteristics and minimizing those least helpful. To the extent that you are culturally self-aware, you can begin to predict the effect your behavior will have on others.

1.4.5 Projected similarity

Projected similarity refers to the assumption that people are more similar to you than they actually are, or that a situation is more similar to yours when in fact it is not. Projected similarity particularly handicaps people in cross-cultural situations. For example, you assume that people from the orient who drink Coca-Cola and wear Levi’s jeans are more similar to you, Western people, than they actually are. When you act based on this assumed similarity, you often find that you act inappropriately and thus ineffectively. At the base of projected similarity is a subconscious parochialism (narrow-minded behavior). You automatically assume that there is only one way to be – your way. Therefore people often fall into an illusion of understanding while being unaware of their misunderstandings. “I understand you perfectly but you don’t understand me” is an expression typical for such a situation. The other possibility is that all communicating parties may wonder later why other parties do not live up to the “agreement” they had reached.

One of the best exercises for developing empathy and reducing parochialism and projected similarity is role reversal. For example, when dealing with a foreign businessman try to imagine the type of family he comes from, the number of siblings he has, the social and economic conditions he grew up with, his goals in working for his organization, his life goals and so on. Asking these questions forces you to see the other person as he or she really is, and not as a mere reflection of yourself. It forces you to see both the similarities and the differences. Moreover it encourages highly task-oriented businesspeople such as Americans or Germans, to see the foreigner as a whole person rather than someone with a position and a set of skills needed to accomplish a particular task.