For Corporations, Is It a Small (Global) World, After All?

In one of my overseas assignments some time ago, the global company I was working for had just hired Steve to run its IT center in Hong Kong.  Steve was a Singaporean who had worked at IBM for over twenty years, and had deep functional expertise and experience.  What struck me most about him when I met him, however, was his attire:  a pinstriped suit, white button-down shirt, rep tie and wing tip shoes.  Even though he had left IBM the month before, he (and others like him from IBM in those days) could not quite shed the IBM “uniform” he had worn for so long. 

Most of us are aware of the various practices that organizations implement to try to instill a common corporate culture.  Many Japanese companies with overseas subsidiaries used to require employees to wear uniforms and participate in morning calisthenics.  Wal-Mart had employees in many overseas locations gather around every morning for the Wal-Mart cheer.

These corporate artifacts and behaviors are at the tip of the iceberg that is above the water.  Corporate culture, like national culture, has visible and invisible aspects.  Edgar Schein refers to three levels of culture:  artifacts, values and basic assumptions.  At the tip of the iceberg are rituals and organizational practices, while underneath the water are those less visible attitudes, values and assumptions.

Most organizations, especially those that have a presence in many countries, are constantly looking to create the “glue” that will bind employees’ hearts and minds together.  And many of them focus on such practices.  Talk to managers in some of these multinational companies, and you will refer to the Ford Way, or the Unilever Way, or the Toyota Way.  Do these work?  Every corporation, like every individual, is to some extent a product of its national culture.  It makes assumptions especially around management practices that are in part based on values and beliefs of the national culture of its founders and executives.

Can a global corporation today create a culture that somehow transcends or trumps national culture?   Yes, but only if it focuses on what’s underneath the iceberg – on those values and traits that cut across cultures.

One of the most intriguing pieces of work in this area is by Professor Dan Denison and his colleagues.  Through their research, they have identified four organizational cultural values, or traits (as they put it), that are strongly related to organizational performance.  These are:

·      Involvement – empowering employees, building teams, and developing human capability at all levels to build a sense of commitment and belief that their work is connected to the goals of the organization.

·      Consistency – having leaders who “walk the talk” by role modeling core values, and a set of processes that are aligned with these values.

·      Adaptability – an organization that listens to its customers, takes risks, learns from its mistakes, and is constantly improving.

·      Mission – having a clear sense of purpose and direction, along with a vision of how the organization will look in the future.

Using data from this organizational cultural model that they have collected from 200 organizations in Europe, North America and Asia, along with other data from 218 organizations from seven countries (including Canada, Australia, Brazil, U.S.A., Japan, Jamaica, and South Africa), Denison et al. found generally high correlations between overall performance and these cultural indices:  “The link between company cultures and effectiveness appears to be both strong and consistent.  In addition, the scores for the culture measures are essentially the same for the samples of organizations in each of these … regions.” (p. 106)

What about practices, those behaviors that are above the water of the iceberg? Shouldn’t there be a relationship between these practices and cultural values?  In an interesting study, Fischer et al. surveyed 1239 employees from various organizations in six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia, New Zealand, Turkey and the United States) to analyze the impact of cultural dimensions on perceptions of organizational practices.  They focused on 71 practices, factor analyzed the data, and identified three factors:  employee orientation, formalization, and innovation.  Sample items for employee orientation included:

·      Managers give employees freedom to express their ideas

·      Employees have a say in matters that directly involve them

·      Managers encourage employees to speak up when they disagree with a decision.

Sample items from the formalization factor include:

·      Everything in the organization is done according to a previously defined procedure

·      What employees have to do is strongly determined by formal procedures

·      Control and centralization are important.

Finally, sample items for innovation include:

·      People are always searching for new ways of approaching problems

·      There is a lot of investment in new products in this organization

·      This organization frequently searches for new markets for existing products.

What they found were significant effects of cultural differences (e.g., individualism) on the degree of implementation of these organizational practices.  In general, cultural effects for their sample were significantly and consistently larger than any industry effects. 

There are two take-aways from these studies that I’d like to emphasize.  Number one, organizational cultural values at the abstract or “principle” level can generalize across cultures – which is good news for global organizations that are looking for this glue.  Specifically, taking Denison’s model into account, organizations that are attempting to create a culture of empowerment, consistency of word and deed among their leaders and with their processes, continuous improvement and risk-taking, and clarity of vision will find that these principles can resonate with their employees in different countries.  Not only that, but perhaps even more importantly, having these values in place seems to help companies gain competitive advantage.

Number two, organizations should be careful not to assume that these cultural values will translate into the same behaviors and practices in different countries. To build a universal corporate culture, organizations need to focus on corporate values such as the ones identified by Denison rather than specific practices that may be need to be adapted from culture to culture.  For example, “involvement” for companies based in North America might mean giving employees more freedom to make decisions.  For companies based in Asia, it might mean giving employees information about the company’s plans which will make them feel more included and part of the company – an important consideration especially in collectivist cultures.  “Adaptability” for companies based in North America might mean allowing individual employees to make mistakes and encouraging them to take risks.  For companies based in Asia, this might mean asking groups to find ways to continuously improve their processes.  

            Denison and his colleagues put it this way:  “ … a concept like empowerment is important around the world, but we would not argue that this means the same behaviors would necessarily constitute empowerment in a different national context … (this cultural) model probably says much more about the presence of a desirable set of traits than it does about how those traits are expressed.”

Denison, D., Haaland, S., & Goelzer, P.  (2004).  Is Asia different from the rest of the world?  Organizational Dynamics, 33 (1), pp. 98-109.

Fischer, R., Ferreira, M., Assmar, E., Baris, G., Berberoglu, G., Dalyan, F., Wong, C., Hassan, A., Hanke, K., & Boer, D.  (2014).  Organizational practices across cultures:  An exploration in six cultural contexts.  International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 14 (1), 105-125.

Schein, E.  (2010).  Organizational culture and leadership (fourth edition).  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

Putting Yourself in Someone Else's Shoes (or Sandals)

We know from research that: there are two types of empathy - cognitive empathy and emotional or affective empathy, different parts of our brain are activated when we are using one versus the other, and each has a different impact on our behavior.

For example, Gilin et al. conducted some studies to determine the specific impact of each of these two types of empathy.  They defined cognitive empathy as perspective-taking, while emotional empathy is “the affective capacity to emotionally connect with others and experience sympathy and concern for others.”  Their hypothesis was that these two different types of empathy would work in different situations.  When you need to understand an opponent’s strategic intent, then cognitive empathy would be more effective than emotional empathy.  With tasks that require collaboration with others, on the other hand, emotional empathy would be more effective.  Their findings support their hypothesis and they conclude:

“ … Perspective-taking and (emotional) empathy can each promote understanding that can lead to individual and joint competitive gains, but only when the underlying structure or content of the task requires that particular competency.”  (p. 11)      

  

For global managers, both types are critical; in this piece, I’d like to focus on cognitive empathy.  Cognitive empathy, the ability to recognize and understand another person’s point of view and emotional state, is (as mentioned above) sometimes called “perspective-taking.”  When we are in a different culture, understanding how people from other cultures view things is obviously important.  Goleman has suggested that cognitive empathy is an outgrowth of self-awareness, and I think that makes a lot of sense.  For global managers, this also means being aware of how one’s own culture impacts your own behavior.  Managers who tend to be ethnocentric, and who believe that their style of managing is superior to other cultures’ styles, will find it hard to develop cognitive empathy because they may not even be aware that their style is at least partly driven by cultural assumptions.  

Specifically, cognitive empathy helps global managers by:  1) decreasing stereotyping, 2) helping to promote prosocial behavior or willingness to help, and 3) improving their ability to understand accurately the thoughts and feelings of others.

Let’s take the first benefit.  Research by Galinsky and Moskowitz has shown that perspective-taking might be a more effective strategy than stereotype suppression for decreasing stereotyping.  In an interesting set of experiments, here is what they did and what they found.  In their first experiment, participants were shown a photo of an elderly man and asked to write an essay describing a day in his life.  One third of the participants were given no explicit instructions, one third were asked to suppress any stereotypes, and the remaining third were told to take the perspective of the individual in the photograph when writing their essay.  The second group was told that “previous research has demonstrated that thoughts and impressions are consistently influenced by stereotypic preconceptions, and therefore you should actively try to avoid thinking about the photographed target in such a manner.”  The third group was told to “imagine a day in the life of this individual as if you were that person, looking at the world through his eyes and walking through the world in his shoes.”

Then they were asked to write an essay about a second elderly man whose photo they were shown.  As a third task, the participants were shown a photo of a young African-American man and asked to write a third essay.  The researchers wanted to find out not only whether perspective-taking or stereotype suppression was more powerful, but also whether the experimental instructions would generalize to a different social group.

Raters who did not know which of the essays came from which experimental condition rated both the overall stereotypicality of the contents as well as its overall valence.  The former is a standard measure used in research on stereotype suppression.  Valence was measured to determine how positive the participants rated the evaluations of the target.  What they found was that perspective-taking not only reduced the expression of stereotypical content, but also increased the expression of positive content, while stereotype suppression only affected the former and not the valence.  For the second photo, both perspective-takers and suppressors wrote less-stereotypically based essays than did control participants, while perspective-takers expressed more positive evaluations of the target than did suppressors and control participants.  No differences in stereotypical content were found for the third photo, because, as the researchers learned in a debrief, participants were sensitive to stereotyping by race (wishing to be politically correct, perhaps).  However, perspective-takers expressed more positive evaluations towards the African-American target compared with the elderly targets.

The researchers conclude that “ … perspective-taking is a successful strategy for debiasing social thought.  Perspective-taking tended to increase the expression of positive evaluations of the target, reduced the expression of stereotypic content, and prevented the hyperaccessibility of stereotype construct.”  (p. 720)

Now, let’s take the second benefit of cognitive empathy.  Based on several research studies, what happens in perspective-taking is that by considering another person’s perspective, we see that we and the other person are not so different after all:  “Perspective-taking results in the target becoming more ‘self-like’; after perspective-taking, the cognitive structures for the self and the target share more common elements, resulting in a merger of self and other.” (Galinsky and Ku, p. 596)

Some recent research has shown that perspective-taking helps to improve overall attitudes and evaluations of the target person’s group.  For example, in follow-up studies also using the photo of an elderly man, Galinsky and Ku found that those who were primed to take the elderly man’s perspective also started to evaluate the elderly more positively than a control group.  As the researchers pointed out, however, these findings may not generalize to collectivist cultures where individuals are “more likely to engage in outgroup derogation and intergroup bias … and more likely to be (overly) generous when dealing with friends.” (p. 602)

In another series of experiments conducted in Singapore and the United Kingdom, Wang and her colleagues (2014) built on this research and found that perspective-taking increased willingness to engage in contact with negatively-stereotyped targets, such as an “Ah Beng” (or local hooligan, in Singapore) and the homeless in the United Kingdom.  In one of these studies, participants were shown a photograph of a homeless man; those in the perspective-taking condition were asked to “take the perspective of the individual in the photograph and imagine a day in the life of this individual as if you were that person.” (p. 3) Participants in the control condition were simply asked to write a brief passage describing a typical day in the life of the individual in the photograph.  After this task, they were then shown a photograph of a different individual.  In the same-target-group condition, participants were shown a photograph of another homeless man.  In the different-target-group condition, they were shown a photograph of an African-American.  Consistent with results from previous research, they found that those who were primed to the perspective-taking condition were more willing to engage in contact with the target group (although not necessarily with a different target group).

A third benefit of perspective-taking, especially critical for global leaders, is the improvement in the accuracy of one’s understanding of what the other person might be thinking or feeling.  Ickes and his colleagues have even developed a methodology to study what they call empathic accuracy.  They first videotape target participants while they talk about some event, topic, or problem.  Then these participants watch their own videotape, stopping the tape when they remember some thought or feeling while they were talking.  They write these thoughts or feelings down and the times when they actually took place in the videotape.  Perceivers then watch the video, which is stopped at the times when the target had recalled the thought or feeling.  These perceivers then write down what they believe the target was thinking or feeling that these specific times.  The researchers then compare the perceivers’ responses to what the targets wrote down to obtain a measure of empathic accuracy.

Ickes and his colleagues found that the perceiver’s accuracy in understanding another person is not always a function of familiarity with the other person or his or her experiences, but also on the perceiver’s motivation.  This is somewhat reassuring for those of us working globally, for it suggests that our desire and interest in the other person are strong predictors in how well we can accurately assess their thoughts and feelings. 

One implication here is that global managers who believe that being empathic is important in their role may actually be more motivated to be empathic and can in fact be quite accurate in their perceptions of others’ thoughts and feelings – certainly a key advantage for succeeding as a global leader!

Are there limits to perspective-taking, especially when the person you are interacting with is very dissimilar to you in so many ways?  For example, say that you are a highly-educated, young Dutch female executive dealing with an elderly Nigerian male working in an oil pipeline.  How likely is it that you would be able to take the Nigerian’s perspective?  In my experience, with some effort, this can still work.  And in fact, some research supports this.  Lamm et al. used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how subjects would react to patients under different conditions.  They found that empathy can be achieved, although with more effort from their cognitive executive functions.

So let’s say that you are faced with a cross-cultural situation that you may not fully understand, for example, individuals who are strangely quiet at a meeting you are conducting, or a team from a subsidiary who is continually late in meeting deadlines.  You could of course ask them questions to try to determine what might be causing the problem.  But you could also switch on your cognitive empathy mind-set by using some of these trigger questions to prime your perspective-taking: 

·      Imagine looking at this situation through their eyes and being in their shoes – how would you view this situation?

·      What might this situation look like from their point of view?  How would they explain this? 

·      What might be going on in their minds that could explain why they are behaving this way? 

·      What might some factors be in their situation that might drive them to behave in this way?

REFERENCES

Galinsky, A. & Ku, G.  (2004).  The effects of perspective-taking on prejudice:  The moderating role of self-evaluation.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(5), 594-604.

Galinksy, A. & Moskowitz, G.  (2000).  Perspective-taking:  Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 708-724.

Gilin, D. et al.  (2012).  When to Use Your Head and When to Use Your Heart:  The Differential Value of Perspective-Taking Versus Empathy in Competitive Interactions.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(1), 3-16.

Goleman, D.  (2005).  Emotional Intelligence.  New York:  Bantam Books.

Ickes, W., Gesn, P., & Graham, T.  (2000).  Gender differences in empathic accuracy:  Differential ability or differential motivation?  Personal Relationships, 7, 95-100.

Lamm, C., Meltzoff, A., & Decety, J.  (2010).  How do we empathize with someone who is not like us?  A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 362-376.

Wang, C., Tai, K. Ku, G., & Galinsky, A.  (2014).  Perspective-taking increases willingness to engage in intergroup contact.  PLOS One, 9(1) pp. 1-8.

Leading Authentically in the Global Workplace

Between our coaching calls, Naveen, an Indian vice president of a technology company based in Bangalore, diligently read the handful of articles I had asked him to look over.  In our next call, he seemed perplexed by the term “authentic leadership” that he had seen in a couple of the readings.  What does it mean to be an authentic leader, he asked me.  He had looked up the dictionary definition of authentic and its synonyms, which included genuine, real, not a fake.  Well and good, he agreed.  But he seemed a bit confused.  To be genuine and real with your team, how much do you have to “self-disclose” by letting them know about your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes?  And does being genuine and real imply behaving and only using a leadership style that comes naturally to you?

Take a recent article by Goffee and Jones in Harvard Business Review.   In that piece, they write that one of the qualities of inspirational leaders is that they reveal their weaknesses.  “When leaders reveal their weaknesses, they show us who they are – warts and all.  This may mean they’re irritable on Monday mornings, that they are somewhat disorganized, or even rather shy.  Such admissions work because people need to see leaders own up to some flaw before they participate willingly in an endeavor.  Exposing a weakness establishes trust and thus helps get folks on board.”  

Part of Naveen’s discomfort was a particular concern about the cultural appropriateness of such self-disclosure, especially in countries where the expectations of what an effective leader is may not tolerate such complete transparency, at least initially.  In fact, a couple of more recent articles in Harvard Business Review suggest such caution in this regard.  For example, Rosh and Offerman urge leaders to understand the organizational and cultural context before they self-disclose.  Similarly, Ibarra writes that many models of authentic leadership are particularly American, especially in the advice to tell a personal story about a hardship they have overcome.  He points out that these are based on Western ideals of individualistic triumph over adversity.

In a recent study, two researchers examined how different cultures perceive “authenticity” in others based on their self-expression.  The countries representing these cultures, Germany and China, are on different ends of the spectrum in terms of their individualistic and collectivistic orientation.  An important facet of collectivism is contextualism, the extent to which the context is crucial in understanding other people.  Easterners more than Westerners tend to consider the context when explaining behavior.  On the other hand, in individualistic cultures such as Germany, dispositional information, such as the person’s personal preferences, is more important.  Therefore, according to these researchers, a person expressing both his likes and dislikes will be perceived to be more authentic by Westerners. They predicted that Germans learning about a person who expresses only his likes (culture-incongruent) would seek more dispositional information (culture-congruent), whereas Chinese learning about a person expressing both likes and likes (culture-incongruent) would seek more contextual information (culture-congruent) to better understand this person.  Their sample consisted of 73 German students and 87 Chinese students in universities in Germany and China who were randomly assigned to two scenarios.  In one scenario, they read about the likes and dislikes of a certain person named George (in Germany) or Yong (in China).  In the other scenario, they read about his likes only.

The participants were then asked how much each of 12 statements described George (or Yong).  These statements were based on a scale of authenticity developed by other researchers.  A sample item was the following:  George is true to himself in most situations.  Finally, participants were asked how useful they would find each one of six additional pieces of information to get to know George better. 

What did they find?  In brief, the Germans found the person expressing both likes and dislikes to be more authentic than the person expressing only likes, whereas the opposite was true for the Chinese.  They also validated their prediction: that Germans reading about a person expressing only his likes (culture-incongruent) would seek more dispositional information (culture-congruent), whereas Chinese reading about a person expressing both likes and likes (culture-incongruent) would seek more contextual information (culture-congruent) to better understand this person.  The Chinese rated contextual information as more helpful to better understand a person expressing likes and dislikes than a person expressing only likes  

So in answer to the first of Naveen’s questions, the choice for a leader is not necessarily whether or not to self-disclose, but how much.  Authentic leadership, as one of its pioneers Bill George has stated, is about practicing your values and principles.  It’s also about being honest.  In their surveys of over 75,000 leaders globally, Kouzes and Posner have pointed out that honesty is one of the four characteristics of admired leaders selected by their respondents in over 50 countries: “We simply don’t trust people who can’t or won’t disclose a clear set of values, ethics and standards and live by them.”

I propose the following principles for leader self-disclosure.  The first principle is to inform honestly.  Whether you are talking about your accomplishments or your failures, embellishing them with exaggerations or half-truths will not work in the long term.  We have all read about leaders who have padded their resumes or told stories about their past that, with a bit of fact-checking, turned out to be distorted.  This does not mean that you cannot tell a good story about your past or frame your experience in a way that helps you send a clear message to your team.  Just don’t play fast and loose with your facts.

A second principle is to consider organizational and cultural norms in selecting what to disclose.  Pay attention to these norms and make sure you do not violate them for they can quickly undermine your effectiveness as a leader.  The research study cited above is simply one example of how different cultures react to what they perceive to be authentic behavior.   I know of several organizations with very formal cultures – where employees dress very conservatively, managers and executives are addressed with their last names, and where meetings are run following strict guidelines.  As a new leader coming into such an organization, you may think that behaving this way is not being authentic, but behaving counter-culturally, at least initially, will not make you an effective leader.

A third principle is to consider your audience and, specifically, the relationship you have with your team and colleagues.  Imagine calling a meeting with your new team, most of whom have been with the company for a while, and confessing to them your skepticism at the extent to which people who have been in their jobs for a long time can adapt to change.  This is what happened to Marty, an executive from outside the company who was brought from the outside to head a business unit that had seen its profits and market share shrink.  He had a hard time recovering from his misguided attempt at being authentic. 

These principles should address Naveen’s two questions above.  Fundamentally, authentic leadership starts with having a deep understanding of yourself and how people perceive you.  Bill George and others written about the importance of self-awareness, and the challenges of arriving at this self-knowledge.  However, knowing your reputation, what others think about you, is also important.  You may believe that you are being genuine, that you are acting as an authentic leader, but if others do not perceive you that way, then there is a gap that you will need to address, and not simply dismiss it by saying, “I don’t care what others think of me.”

George, B. et al. (2007).  Discovering your authentic leadership.  Harvard Business Review, February.

Goffee, and Jones, G.  (2000).  Why should anyone be led by you?  Harvard Business Review, September-October.

Ibarra, H.  (2015).  The authenticity paradox.  Harvard Business Review, 93, 52-59.

Kokkoris, M. and Khunen, U.  (2014).  “Express the real you”:  cultural differences in the perception of self-expression as authenticity.  Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(8), 1221-1228.

Kouzes, J. and Posner, B.  (2007).  The leadership challenge (4^th edition).  New York:  Wiley.

     

Rosh, L. and Offermann, L.  (2013).  Be yourself, but carefully.  Harvard Business Review, 91, 135-139.