Cross – Culture and Institutional Study

HANOI UNIVERSITY

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

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CROSS – CULTURE AND INSTITUTIONAL STUDY

Group 5:         Tran Thi Thanh Hang

                                                                                23/06/1995

                                                                                Nguyen Thi Tra My

                                                                                06/10/1995

Class:                 1A13

Hanoi, October 31, 2016

Question 1:

Write a short summary of eight cultural dimensions explained in the talk of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon. Give your personal experiences related to one or two dimensions and provide further explanation.

Answer:

In the talk of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon, they mentioned eight cultural dimensions which are communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, and scheduling.

The first one is communicating. When we say that someone is a good communicator, what do we actually mean? The responses differ wildly from society to society. In low-context cultures, good communication is precise, simple, explicit and clear. Americans are the most explicit or low-context culture there is low-context meaning their conversation assumes relatively little intuitive understanding. This is not surprising for a young country composed of immigrants that prides itself on straight-talking. In high-context cultures, communication is sophisticated, nuanced and layered. Messages are often implied but not plainly stated. Less is put in writing, more is left to interpretation, and understanding may depend on reading between the lines.

The second one is evaluating. All cultures believe that criticism should be given constructively, but the definition of "constructive" varies greatly. This scale measures a preference for frank versus diplomatic negative feedback. The French, for example, are high-context communicators relative to Americans, yet they are more direct in their criticism. Vietnamese and Chinese are at the same context level, but the Chinese are more frank when providing negative feedback. As in Vietnamese culture, people are very nice to each other; they rarely give negative feedback to one another because they think when it comes to say negative things to others,

The third one is persuading. It is the way in which you persuade others and the kinds of arguments you find convincing are deeply rooted in your culture's philosophical, religious and educational assumptions and attitudes. Typically, a Western executive will break down an argument into a sequence of distinct components, while Asian managers tend to show how the components all fit together.

For example, when I worked with a team in which the members came from different parts all over the world, at that time I thought the difficulty would be in bridging the cultural differences between Asians and Europeans. And it is true that the Asian members of my team are uncomfortable with the way our French and German members publicly disagree with them and give them negative feedback. I led our team members on how to moderate their approaches and reactions to work more effectively together. But to my surprise, the most serious difficulties we had on the team were between the Chinese and the Japanese. The Chinese gripe that the Japanese are slow to make decisions, inflexible, and unwilling to change. The Japanese complain that the Chinese do not think things through, make rash decisions, and seem to thrive in chaos. Not only do these two Asian groups have difficulty working together, but the Japanese in many ways behave more like the Germans than like the Chinese – something I never anticipated.