2.6 Common cultural misconceptions and the potential of zooming for developing a collaborative team culture

During the interview the following main misconceptions regarding intercultural communication were identified:

• one communication partner may link something different to what his/her partner mentioned due to the differences in the expression of ideas;
• generalized ideas of one or another national representative are errorsome, because cultures and nations are not homogeneous;
• misunderstanding may arise because people expect them to arise due to different ethical backgrounds or diverse appearances.

Do you agree with Prof. Bolten’s statements?

I totally agree with all of the statements and arguments given by Professor Bolten. He clearly put it forward that people share misconceptions because we tend to confuse our perception of a culture as something uniform and homogeneous influencing all its representatives to the same extent. Though we should never forget that cultures are realms which shape their representatives individually and cultures are not only those ones that correspond to our mother tongues and ethnic communities we were born in. Cultures come from schools, work, neighbourhoods. Additionally, we are prone to relate to other people following stereotypes based on strictly visible conceptions, this means that our attitudes are to some extent self-made and culture-unrelated.

How can zooming in and zooming out help to develop a collaborative team culture?

When we are working in a team, we may refer to the approaches of zooming in and zooming out. The better we zoom in on the field of actors, the better we understand how they interact and structures become dynamic. Change from zooming in to zooming out gives an opportunity to advance from structure-specific and culture-related perspective to process-specific and interculturally-related perspective.

To work in a team, we have to do both things. We should play the game of zooming in and zooming out. When we are interested in structures and aspire to have some certainty, we zoom out. If we are interested more in different things relating to processes, we zoom in. These techniques provide us with a perfect assistance which is about switching attention under control in the context of our personal needs.