Reflective Paper
Introduction
Culture is learned. Man is not born with culture, but with the ability to learn, acquire, and develop culture through experience. For example, a child is born not knowing what culture is or how things are done in the eyes of society. But he learns through imitating, how thing are properly done. He then develops the necessary tools to go about his daily activities. Also, through the help of language, this is the primary tool for communication; the elder generation can pass to the younger generation the knowledge and skills they had acquired through experience. Therefore, because of these things, you could say that culture is learned.
All people have varied culture. There are differently groups of people around the world, and we call these groups different societies. A society may be a group of people banding together and living in a stable union, and pooling together their efforts to attain a common objective by collective action. Knowing this, people should not judge a custom of one society using his own since they both have different societies and culture. With this consideration, this paper gives a short overview of my observed behavioral pattern of the French and Chinese business culture. Understanding this behavioral pattern is important for doing effective communication with people and people groups from these countries. Effective communication is vital in establishing business and personal relationship in these countries.
This paper is intended to be a reflection of my learning experience in a cross cultural environment context. The first part of the paper gives a short overview of my observed behavioral pattern of the French and Chinese business culture.
My Background
I was born in Hong Kong but I finished my last 5 year of formal education in Australia. I have a Bachelor degree with a major in accounting from an Australian university. Prior to my undergraduate studies I had studied my year 11 and year 12 in a Catholic High school in Australia. I am a qualified accountant and have worked in the finance and accounting field for somewhat twenty years now. After I graduated, I worked in an Australian CPA firm for 3 years. These 8 years of oversea experiences have rooted my thinking pattern and communication style.
Cross Culture Environment
Culture is a group product. Culture was not designed by man to become what it has become. It is simply the accumulation of certain practices acquired by man through his interaction with other people. For example, I with my group may start out on a research. I may find a good method in doing this research with the help of another group mate. Other members may find a better way of improving the method I used in doing the research. And in due time, other groups may seem interested in my way of doing research and may try to imitate it. Just one person in the group may not be a Man just adapted whatever practice was most useful to him at the time and then went on to keep that practice as time went further on. Therefore, culture is not only learned but is also transmitted through human interaction and experience. A generation may put an imprint upon the one before it, thus, making an accumulation and selective result of group life.
I do believe that culture is transmitted from generation to generation or from another to one another. This may happen through oral traditions or in writing. It may be transmitted through everyday conversation, through interaction between the older and the younger, and even through reward and punishment. Culture is accumulated and whatever the past has learned, the present and future generation may build on it to produce something better which may aid them more as they go along the roads of everyday life. For example, when people in the early days wanted to preserve food to keep them from rotting, they put them in barrels filled with salt or put in seasoning or exposed them under the sun to dry. By doing that, they are still ensured of having meat which wasn’t rotten but lost the flavor of fresh meat. So, the future generation invented a better way of preserving the meat and its flavor, by freezing it, and they accomplished that with the aid of the refrigerator.
Another means of transporting knowledge from generation to generation is through books and spoken language. The accumulated knowledge and learning of the bygone scholars and great thinkers of the past are imparted to us through the books and other written materials in which they have so tediously spent their lives writing. And also, through the spoken medium; oral traditions may not have been successfully passed to the younger generations if not through the use of songs, tales, stories, and other such things. That is why communication arts is a very important part of the school curriculum.
With my experience in Coface, I would agree to say that culture is adaptive. Culture continually renews itself. It is even said that nothing is much more predictable than death, change, and culture change. Humans have a way of inventing things when he is in very much need of it. If he finds that the method he uses is no longer obtaining his desired results, he then turns to a new strategy which may give to him the results he so desires. For example, a teacher may find her class very rowdy, noisy and out of control. So she tries to shout on the top of her voice just to get the class’s attention. But it would only cause more of the riot, so, she tries another method. She keeps quiet and waits for the class to settle down. And settle they did. You see, this discovery of hers may result in a new behavior pattern which satisfies the characteristic mentioned above.
Having works in Coface for the past 9 years has exposed me with tremendous multicultural interpersonal experiences. Coface is French insurance company operating as a Branch office in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong office is managed by an expatriate from Head office to oversee the strategic development in the Greater China Region. We have three other French expatriates who are in charge of the underwriting, IT and operation department of the company. In my current position as head of finance department, I am further expose to PRC working culture environment.
My Learning Style
Based on the learning style questionnaire given in the leadership and motivation course from MGSM last year, l realize that I am a kinesthetic learner I tend to spend a lot of time think through the problem. This can be a good way to work out a problem but I sometime may have waste a lot of energy analyzing and over analyzing the problem and not enough time actually solving the problem. This assessment also revealed my learning style is more sensing meaning I tend to learn easier by memorizing facts. I am also a visual learner. I learn best by using pictures, diagrams and flowchart which I always think that my educational background and my profession of being an Accountant lead me to a sequential learner. I must admit that I do not always understand the big pictures, but can process the different elements of problem logically.
Actually, this experience enables me to believe that intercultural competence does not only mean the ability of an individual to express his or her views and opinions intellectually. It also means that I must be developed wholistically to be able to understand and respect the culture, religion, beliefs, and practices of other individuals in the society. This concept means that I as intercultural competent person should be intelligent and at the same time respectful and open-minded regarding the issues and changes happening in my community. Without open-mindedness and ethno-relativism, knowledge regarding other cultures will not be applied effectively, and opens opportunities for racial discrimination and injustice in the society.
My Communication Style
During my primary and junior high school education, the system of teaching in Hong Kong was much concentrated was pushing the knowledge to students and assess them only through written examinations. There was little or no opportunity for interactions where students could openly ask any questions. Asking too many questions will seems to be badly behaved students and lack of respect to the teacher. As a result, my communication skills and self confident was unconscious underdeveloped. However, I would say that under this kind of education environment, I was a good listener and I had my strength in understanding, viewing information from different perspectives and interpreting of information correctly.
In my later years of senior high school which I was educated in Australia, there was a lot of focus and emphasis on communication and interaction during class. Students was encourage to ask as many questions as they wish and even the “native and stupid” questions was throw out which made whole class laughed, the Australian students was never shy about their behavior and the teacher treated all questions politely and professionally. I realize that my previous educational environment in Hong Kong has hindered my ability to communicate freely and effectively in the Australian society. As times goes by, I realized that every time I had to face the crowd, my confident built up until I finally overcame the challenge of not being able to understand the subject or topic well; I am able to communicate effectively and confidently than before.
Actually, I do several language studies and acquisitions in order to communicate effectively and confidently. My innate motivation affects the time I spent in learning a language. As my learning attitudes affect motivation, if I expect to succeed—I will be more likely to succeed, if I have unreasonable expectations you may get discouraged, certain kinds of anxiety can interfere with my language learning, fear of making mistakes can inhibit your learning, too much correction or criticism can inhibit my learning, the more positive I feel about the speakers of a language, the more motivation I will have to learn it, if I want to communicate with speakers of a language, I will be more motivated to learn it, and if I need to use a language, I will be more motivated to learn it.
People learn better if their learning is encouraged by speakers of the language, People need to experience language used in context, if speakers of two languages really want to communicate, they can do a lot with a little, people have expectations about who speaks which language, communication tends to take the easiest path, people may resist speaking their language because they want to learn your language, people often modify their speech when speaking to foreigners, in traditional cultures there may be only one right way to do something, it may be culturally inappropriate to be too direct in what you say, and every culture has taboo topics.
Basically, language acquisition is a developmental process. I understand that learning a language build up own systems, we need lots of comprehensible input, we can improve the sound discrimination, memory, and grammatical sensitivity skills, we can compensate for deficiencies in some skills. From my experience, I discover that the sooner we can acquire the grammatical system of a language, the sooner we can use the language creatively, we need chances to negotiate meaning with native speakers, native speakers often highly value good pronunciation, repetition helps things stick, producing language that sounds too good can be misleading, the more meaningful exposure, the more we learn, we cannot rely on memorization alone, memorized material can give a false impression of your proficiency, our brain analyzes language whether we know it or not, knowing a language is different from knowing about a language, knowing about a language may help us learn it, body language, gestures, and we communicate as much as words, learners build up an auditory image of what the language sounds like, language learners need to learn to understand and produce well-formed discourses, predictable scripts aid comprehension, language learners seem to hit plateaus, we need exposure to language in a variety of social settings, one language may interfere with another, the mind tends to filter out redundant material, productive skills are harder than receptive skills, comprehensible output can become comprehensible input, knowing the topic helps us interpret what we hear or read, linguistic context helps us understand the meaning of words, knowledge of a language may lie dormant, but be reactivated, multilingual people may associate languages with a particular setting or audience.
Team Work Skill
Although I like structure, I can be pretty flexible. I am flexible with plans and changes. I think flexible is a good skill as long as I am not being taken advantages of. I listen to understand requirement of the other person’s position. I like to observe people, especially if I do not really know them. This helps to refine my judgment of the person personality, prepared myself better for future interpersonal relationship and negotiation. Due to my professional background, high respect to deadline is the fundamental value of an Accountant. Occasionally, I might seem to be insensitive to my team and other colleagues in delivering projects and work on time. Having known the downside of the Accountant role, I always try to accommodate requests and allow flexibility so long it will not affect the timeliness of the project.
From this wonderful experience, I discovered that the key task and process strategies of creating and working within the context of a multicultural team are: team building; communication and its process; participation; conflict management; and performance evaluation. In building multicultural teams, the manager must be able to develop a shared strategy on how the team will work together. The utilization of team building programmes and activities is deemed uncomplicated yet effective through simple socialization exercises that results to cultural learning opportunities. The concept of teamwork is also credited to the affirmative effects on the psychological health and interests of organisation’s member. Communication, on the other hand, serves a number of fundamental functions such as control, motivation, emotional expression, and information. It maintains values and relationships necessary to keep the system of the united organisation. Similarly, participation should be directed towards team dynamics and extends beyond organization’s success. Managers must be able to promote participation among employees through motivation and the likes. The case of conflict management is also inherent. Multicultural work settings are often challenged by conflict, thus managers should be able to implement the appropriate conflict resolutions strategies (e.g. effective communication). Lastly, performance evaluation must be rooted not only on individual basis but also on collective contributions of the members of multicultural team towards the achievement of organization’s objectives and overall success, productivity and competitive advantage.
Action plan:
First, considering that I am doing business in a multicultural environment that has its own trade-related culture and as a part of acculturation, I will set on with the “Coface corporate system”. In the business world, acculturation serves as the common denominator for host and foreign culture to avoid conflict and miscommunication. At this situation, I need not to compare the culture of France with the Hong Kong’s culture. Instead, the least but could be the best thing to do is to “co-exist” with the existing policy present in the host culture. Acculturation is a” term originally applied only to the process concerning a foreign culture, from the acculturing or accultured recipient point of view, having this foreign culture added and mixed with that of his or her already existing one”. In the process of acculturation, I must try to accustom my self to the “mother culture”. However, cultural differences may come along. But it is still important to consider that every culture has its own characteristic and views on things. Culture is relative and that it does not mean that what is “right” in Hong Kong is “wrong” in France when it comes to work environment.
Second, as a part of cultural integration, I will adapt to the international policies of the host country. I should be familiar with the host culture. Believing that the cultural incorporation will solve all of the cross-cultural problems, it is essential that the expatriate need not to be only technically proficient but to have an overly simplistic view of the cultural integration of the firm’s activities and existing culture on the host culture. Using an integrator can help. It will give an idea on how will a foreign culture will mix up with a host culture. An example of integrator is the manager or inhabitant workers to the host culture. Their presence will be used in communicating with people involve in some business circumstances. I do believe that cross-cultural communication plays a vital role in any business world. The awareness and knowledge that they hold will provide needed information that could lessen up the problem of cultural resistance and differences. By doing it so, problems in communication could be minimized if not alleviated.
Final Assessment
It was already mentioned that education and learning, influences the ability of an individual to become intercultural competent. Not only does it depend on one’s knowledge of language, but also on one’s ability to empathize and respect another’s cultures and beliefs. In countries where ethnic diversity is on the rise, whether due to political upheavals, economic conditions, climactic catastrophes, shifting populations, or simply increased contact among people of different backgrounds, successful relationships with friends, neighbors and intercultural partners depend on the ability to deal with differences in a positive manner. From the arena of international business to family life, there is an increasing need to be able to deal effectively and appropriately with diversity, whether ethnic, racial, religious, or cultural. With this, international and intercultural organizations play an important role, and this is to provide not only pleasant and productive educational experiences form their participants, but also to indirectly affect their families, neighbors, and communities.
Furthermore, in order for one to truly become intercultural competent, it is important to learn about an individual’s own culture and about other cultures. One way is to cultivate relationships with individual who can serve as cultural informants, or people whom a person can question about the culture and verify perceptions. Another way is to attend cultural events in communities to learn about rituals and values, and demonstrate interest to members of that culture’s community. Finally, one can be flexible in his or her intercultural interactions by reserving judgments about behaviors and intentions until he or she understands the cultural context in which they were generated.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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