Business cultures: How different are Swiss, Chinese and Americans?
Ralf Haller
April 19th, 2009
At Extendance we pride ourselves on having lived and worked in many different cultures: USA, Europe (Germany, UK, France, Switzerland, Finland), Asia (Hong Kong, PR China, Japan) and Australia.
It is obvious that cultural differences between countries can have a big impact on the success of business relations. My colleague Adrian is an expert in human sciences and what I am writing here is trivial to him but although I have had these different cultural work experiences I am still surprised to date how pronounced these can be even between countries in Europe. E.g. would you have known that Belgium and Denmark are entirely different in terms of their uncertainty avoidance thinking? Belgium is, in a list of 53 countries, the 5th highest, right after Greece, Portugal, Guatemala and Uruguay, while Denmark is ranked 51st, with only Jamaica and Singapore ranked lower. Uncertainty avoidance means that these countries are most reliant on rules and plans and will most likely stick to procedure regardless of circumstances.
Now I came across an iPhone app that helps you with comparing more than 100 countries with each other in terms of their cultural differences. CultureGPS Light is free and CultureGPS Professional costs a steep (for iPhone apps) 20EUR. I think it is worth the money, though, if you have to do with lots of different nationalities in your daily business. The iPhone app is based on Geert Hofsted’s surveys and its theory called Cultural Dimensions. The below quote from him sounds a bit too negative for my taste. I think the way I will use this iPhone app is in preparing meetings or business trips to be warned of possible differences and be more sensitive upfront. I just used it yesterday to figure out the possible source of some disagreements with someone from Norway and think I found it. In this case I did it afterwards. Would have been better to do it beforehand though. Lesson learned. Also I am of course aware that the world and cultures are too complex to describe them with 5 dimensions only and what you only get from this app is some average results that one should still use with caution. In addition what I figured is that it is also often lots fun…
” Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.” Prof. Geert Hofstede, Emeritus Professor, Maastricht University.
