Working with Cultural Differences

Given the internationalization of business, and the increasing need to work effectively with culturally diverse people in one's own country, people are facing new and more common challenges in developing workplace relationships. The challenges include communicating across differences in the use of silence and indirectness, dealing with negative exchanges, or neutral exchanges that one party perceives as negative, making decisions, working through criticisms and disagreements, and interpreting changing workplace dynamics. In this book, Distinguished Professor Richard Brislin shows us that helpful guidelines for everyday intercultural interactions are clear in information that has been gathered across the fields of cross-cultural psychology, organizational behavior and intercultural communication. A psychologist and a professor of management, Brislin uses actual examples he calls critical incidents to illustrate the basic psychological processes that play a part in effective, and ineffective, intercultural relationships across workplaces. The differences they face include individual and collective cultural background, the relative emphasis placed on the importance of status and power, behaviors relative to a culture's social norms, and gender expectations of males and females in the workplace. Insights explained here allow readers understand how they can benefit from, rather than be frustrated by, intercultural experiences, and how to better develop such relations. Short stories throughout the text demonstrate how actual people in business recognized and dealt with intercultural issues, at home and abroad.

Richard Brislin is a Shidler College Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Management, at the Shidler College of Business, University of Hawaii. He has been awarded the University of Hawaii Regents' Medal for excellence in teaching, and is frequently asked to give workshops for American and Asian managers working on international assignments. He is co-developer of materials used in cross-cultural training programs and is author of a text in cross-cultural psychology. Brislin's PhD in Psychology is from Pennsylvania State University.