Managing Cultural Differences Summary
Last Name: Bouman First Name: Joris
Student #: s3920941 Week: 1
Javidan, Teagarden & Bowen (2010): Managing Yourself: Making it overseas
Global mindset:
1. Intellectual capital: knowledge of international business and the capacity to learn.
Intellectual capital is by far the easiest of the three types of capital to develop.
● Global business savvy: a strong grasp of how the industry operates worldwide, how
global customers behave, how your competitors target their needs and habits, and how
strategic risk varies by geography.
● Cognitive complexity: the ability to piece together multiple scenarios with many moving
parts, without becoming paralyzed by the number of options.
● Cosmopolitan look: an active interest in the culture, history, geography, and economic
systems of different parts of the world.
2. Psychological capital: openness to different cultures and the capacity to change. Psychological
capital is the most difficult type of capital to develop because there are limits to how much you
can change your personality. Two important questions to ask yourself: “how do I feel about
people, places, and thing that are foreign to me?” Why? “Do I feel the need to change my feelings
in any way?” Why? What’s in it for me?
● Passion for diversity: a penchant for exploring other parts of the world, experiencing other
cultures, and trying new ways of doing things.
● Thirst for adventure: an appreciation for and ability to thrive in unpredictable and complex
environments.
● Self-assurance: self-confidence, a sense of humor, a willingness to take risks in new
contexts, and high levels of energy: the ability to be energized, rather than drained, by a
foreign context.
3. Social capital: the ability to form connections, to bring people together, and to influence
stakeholders – including colleagues, clients, suppliers, and regulatory agencies – who are unlike
you in cultural heritage, professional background, or political outlook. Social capital is largely
relationship-based and acquired through experience. The trick is to widen your circle of social
interaction to include individuals with interests that diverge from yours.
● Intercultural empathy: the ability to engage and connect emotionally with people from
other parts of the world.
● Interpersonal impact: the ability to bring together divergent views, develop consensus,
and maintain credibility; and skill at building networks – not just with peers and senior
leaders but with other, less obvious potential connections.
● Diplomacy: listening to what is said and what is not said, ease in conversations with
people who are different from you, and a greater inclination to ask than to answer.
→ The most effective international leaders are strong in all three dimensions.
1
,Earley & Mosakowski (2004): Toward Cultural Intelligence
Unfortunately, business is populated with managers who fail to grasp important cultural nuances. When
problems arise, it is difficult to determine if an outsourcing partner simply failed to deliver on a promise or
if national differences in work ethic or a misunderstanding of what a delivery date means was responsible.
Traditional Contributions from Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology.
Aggregate approach to culture: an approach that identifies commonalities at a country (or occasionally
regional) level and is interested in what people generally believe and value within a country. Typically, this
sociologically drive approach has emphasized dimensions or typologies of cultures across which different
countries are compared.
The aggregate approach ultimately led to the ecological fallacy (by Geert Hofstede): the error or difficulty
one encounters when taking a generalized cultural value and assuming that it applies to all individuals
within a given culture.
Individual approach to culture: seeking to understand how an individual’s actions are in part the result
of national and even organizational values. Although people differ in many ways, they share a number of
basic characteristics universally
regardless of their national, ethnic, religious, or racial backgrounds. A person’s self-knowledge refers to
the complex way in which we define ourselves. The potential usefulness of the individual approach is for
understanding how cultural values and managerial practices influence work outcomes through their effect
on individual self-knowledge and motives.
The research streams described above share an emphasis on how macro-societal influences impact a
person. That is, these approaches address a question of top-down cultural influence (values, systems,
etc.) on an employee (e.g., does a cultural value such as group orientation or a strong work ethic
influence an employee’s actions and, if so, how?). The third approach (cultural intelligence) doesn’t focus
on these macro-societal influences and culture per se. Instead, it focuses on the individual and what it
takes for a manager to adapt to new cultural environments.
A New Direction for Cross-Cultural Management: Cultural Intelligence (CQ)
A manager’s capability to adjust to new cultures is what we call cultural intelligence (CQ).
The cultural intelligence framework
1. The Head (thinking)
The Head of CQ refers to what you know and how you can gain new knowledge – it is
strategically “thinking about thinking”.
The objective becomes discovering learning strategies that help you uncover critical features of a
new culture “on the go”. This “higher” level of learning has two pieces: specific strategies for
learning to learn, and cultural intuition or a sense of what is happening and why.
2. The Heart (energizing)
The Heart of CQ means energizing your actions and building personal confidence. An effective
manager must have the confidence and motivation to adapt.
3. The Body (action)
The Body is the element through which intentions and desires are translated into action.
Cultural Intelligence Profiles
● The local: a person focused on his or her own specific environment.
● The analyst: someone who can think strategically and who has a natural intuition for what is
happening in a new cultural situation.
2
, ● The confident: someone who has great personal confidence and possesses focused goals about
working with people from other cultural backgrounds.
● The mimic: a manager who has effective control over action and behavior.
● The cultural chameleon: a person possessing all three CQ features.
A manager will probably fall into a combination of these three characteristics.
Moving Forward with Cross-Cultural Management
This article has emphasized the importance of shifting away from a “cultural values as central”
perspective toward a more complex view of the individual. The advantage of the CQ-approach is that its
focus on creating culturally based solutions dynamically in a unique situation, rather than through the
provision of general rules or practices. A company can enhance the cultural capabilities of its managers in
two general ways:
1. Existing managers can be trained using methods targeting the specific strengths and weaknesses
of CQ.
2. To select managers for their CQ attributes rather than try to train them.
The ability of a company to develop and allocate its CQ resources throughout its global organization is
imported strategically.
Lauring, Drogendijk and Kubovcikova (2022: The role of context in overcoming
distance-related problems in global virtual teams
This study investigates how Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) address challenges arising from physical and
social distance, using organizational discontinuity theory as a lens. Conducted within the R&D department
of a Danish multinational corporation, the research surveyed 23 GVTs (171 team members and 23 team
leaders) to explore individual mechanisms—time zone adjustment and trust in peers—and the moderating
influence of team-level openness to cultural diversity on job role clarity and performance.
Trust in Peers
● Trust is strongly linked to improved job role clarity and performance at the individual level.
● In teams with high openness to cultural diversity, the positive effect of trust on performance
weakens, indicating that openness can partially substitute for trust.
Time Zone Adjustment:
● Alone, time zone adjustment shows no significant direct impact on job role clarity or performance.
● However, it enhances job role clarity in teams with high openness to cultural diversity, suggesting
a context-dependent effect.
Openness to Cultural Diversity:
● At the team level, openness directly boosts individual job role clarity and, to a lesser extent,
performance.
● It moderates individual mechanisms:
● Strengthens the effect of time zone adjustment on job role clarity.
● Reduces the reliance on trust for performance, making trust less critical in open teams.
Trust in peers is a vital mechanism for overcoming social distance, consistently enhancing clarity and
performance in GVTs. Time zone adjustment’s effectiveness hinges on team openness to diversity,
highlighting that individual efforts alone are insufficient without a supportive team environment. A team
culture that embraces cultural diversity directly improves individual outcomes and modifies the impact of
individual efforts, either amplifying or compensating for them. The interplay between individual actions
3
Last Name: Bouman First Name: Joris
Student #: s3920941 Week: 1
Javidan, Teagarden & Bowen (2010): Managing Yourself: Making it overseas
Global mindset:
1. Intellectual capital: knowledge of international business and the capacity to learn.
Intellectual capital is by far the easiest of the three types of capital to develop.
● Global business savvy: a strong grasp of how the industry operates worldwide, how
global customers behave, how your competitors target their needs and habits, and how
strategic risk varies by geography.
● Cognitive complexity: the ability to piece together multiple scenarios with many moving
parts, without becoming paralyzed by the number of options.
● Cosmopolitan look: an active interest in the culture, history, geography, and economic
systems of different parts of the world.
2. Psychological capital: openness to different cultures and the capacity to change. Psychological
capital is the most difficult type of capital to develop because there are limits to how much you
can change your personality. Two important questions to ask yourself: “how do I feel about
people, places, and thing that are foreign to me?” Why? “Do I feel the need to change my feelings
in any way?” Why? What’s in it for me?
● Passion for diversity: a penchant for exploring other parts of the world, experiencing other
cultures, and trying new ways of doing things.
● Thirst for adventure: an appreciation for and ability to thrive in unpredictable and complex
environments.
● Self-assurance: self-confidence, a sense of humor, a willingness to take risks in new
contexts, and high levels of energy: the ability to be energized, rather than drained, by a
foreign context.
3. Social capital: the ability to form connections, to bring people together, and to influence
stakeholders – including colleagues, clients, suppliers, and regulatory agencies – who are unlike
you in cultural heritage, professional background, or political outlook. Social capital is largely
relationship-based and acquired through experience. The trick is to widen your circle of social
interaction to include individuals with interests that diverge from yours.
● Intercultural empathy: the ability to engage and connect emotionally with people from
other parts of the world.
● Interpersonal impact: the ability to bring together divergent views, develop consensus,
and maintain credibility; and skill at building networks – not just with peers and senior
leaders but with other, less obvious potential connections.
● Diplomacy: listening to what is said and what is not said, ease in conversations with
people who are different from you, and a greater inclination to ask than to answer.
→ The most effective international leaders are strong in all three dimensions.
1
,Earley & Mosakowski (2004): Toward Cultural Intelligence
Unfortunately, business is populated with managers who fail to grasp important cultural nuances. When
problems arise, it is difficult to determine if an outsourcing partner simply failed to deliver on a promise or
if national differences in work ethic or a misunderstanding of what a delivery date means was responsible.
Traditional Contributions from Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology.
Aggregate approach to culture: an approach that identifies commonalities at a country (or occasionally
regional) level and is interested in what people generally believe and value within a country. Typically, this
sociologically drive approach has emphasized dimensions or typologies of cultures across which different
countries are compared.
The aggregate approach ultimately led to the ecological fallacy (by Geert Hofstede): the error or difficulty
one encounters when taking a generalized cultural value and assuming that it applies to all individuals
within a given culture.
Individual approach to culture: seeking to understand how an individual’s actions are in part the result
of national and even organizational values. Although people differ in many ways, they share a number of
basic characteristics universally
regardless of their national, ethnic, religious, or racial backgrounds. A person’s self-knowledge refers to
the complex way in which we define ourselves. The potential usefulness of the individual approach is for
understanding how cultural values and managerial practices influence work outcomes through their effect
on individual self-knowledge and motives.
The research streams described above share an emphasis on how macro-societal influences impact a
person. That is, these approaches address a question of top-down cultural influence (values, systems,
etc.) on an employee (e.g., does a cultural value such as group orientation or a strong work ethic
influence an employee’s actions and, if so, how?). The third approach (cultural intelligence) doesn’t focus
on these macro-societal influences and culture per se. Instead, it focuses on the individual and what it
takes for a manager to adapt to new cultural environments.
A New Direction for Cross-Cultural Management: Cultural Intelligence (CQ)
A manager’s capability to adjust to new cultures is what we call cultural intelligence (CQ).
The cultural intelligence framework
1. The Head (thinking)
The Head of CQ refers to what you know and how you can gain new knowledge – it is
strategically “thinking about thinking”.
The objective becomes discovering learning strategies that help you uncover critical features of a
new culture “on the go”. This “higher” level of learning has two pieces: specific strategies for
learning to learn, and cultural intuition or a sense of what is happening and why.
2. The Heart (energizing)
The Heart of CQ means energizing your actions and building personal confidence. An effective
manager must have the confidence and motivation to adapt.
3. The Body (action)
The Body is the element through which intentions and desires are translated into action.
Cultural Intelligence Profiles
● The local: a person focused on his or her own specific environment.
● The analyst: someone who can think strategically and who has a natural intuition for what is
happening in a new cultural situation.
2
, ● The confident: someone who has great personal confidence and possesses focused goals about
working with people from other cultural backgrounds.
● The mimic: a manager who has effective control over action and behavior.
● The cultural chameleon: a person possessing all three CQ features.
A manager will probably fall into a combination of these three characteristics.
Moving Forward with Cross-Cultural Management
This article has emphasized the importance of shifting away from a “cultural values as central”
perspective toward a more complex view of the individual. The advantage of the CQ-approach is that its
focus on creating culturally based solutions dynamically in a unique situation, rather than through the
provision of general rules or practices. A company can enhance the cultural capabilities of its managers in
two general ways:
1. Existing managers can be trained using methods targeting the specific strengths and weaknesses
of CQ.
2. To select managers for their CQ attributes rather than try to train them.
The ability of a company to develop and allocate its CQ resources throughout its global organization is
imported strategically.
Lauring, Drogendijk and Kubovcikova (2022: The role of context in overcoming
distance-related problems in global virtual teams
This study investigates how Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) address challenges arising from physical and
social distance, using organizational discontinuity theory as a lens. Conducted within the R&D department
of a Danish multinational corporation, the research surveyed 23 GVTs (171 team members and 23 team
leaders) to explore individual mechanisms—time zone adjustment and trust in peers—and the moderating
influence of team-level openness to cultural diversity on job role clarity and performance.
Trust in Peers
● Trust is strongly linked to improved job role clarity and performance at the individual level.
● In teams with high openness to cultural diversity, the positive effect of trust on performance
weakens, indicating that openness can partially substitute for trust.
Time Zone Adjustment:
● Alone, time zone adjustment shows no significant direct impact on job role clarity or performance.
● However, it enhances job role clarity in teams with high openness to cultural diversity, suggesting
a context-dependent effect.
Openness to Cultural Diversity:
● At the team level, openness directly boosts individual job role clarity and, to a lesser extent,
performance.
● It moderates individual mechanisms:
● Strengthens the effect of time zone adjustment on job role clarity.
● Reduces the reliance on trust for performance, making trust less critical in open teams.
Trust in peers is a vital mechanism for overcoming social distance, consistently enhancing clarity and
performance in GVTs. Time zone adjustment’s effectiveness hinges on team openness to diversity,
highlighting that individual efforts alone are insufficient without a supportive team environment. A team
culture that embraces cultural diversity directly improves individual outcomes and modifies the impact of
individual efforts, either amplifying or compensating for them. The interplay between individual actions
3
