Task: Working in an intercultural team – some practical questions
Imagine that next month you start working for an international company and you know that your team consists of:
- a woman who was born in Ghana
- a woman who was born in Russia, immigrated to the UK as a little girl and graduated in the USA, and
- a young intern you don’t know anything about.
Reflect on the following questions and note down your answers in your learning journal.
How can you apply what you have learned about the open and closed concept of culture to your team, considering the little information you have about your team members?
What are some of the advantages and some of the disadvantages of a closed approach to culture based on national belonging?
Think about 4-5 work related values or behaviours people from abroad would associate with the country or region you are from. They can be positive, negative or neutral. Note that these attributes come from a closed culture point of view. Please write them down in your learning journal.
Now assume that during your first online meeting, your boss introduces you to the team as “This is your new colleague from….” mentioning your home country. Imagine that your colleagues associate you with the behaviour or values you just wrote down. Which expectations would you want to fulfil and which not? How would you feel about this situation, in which you are perceived from a closed-culture point of view? Note down the answers in your learning journal.
Give examples of situations in which your ‘automatic’ assumptions and behaviour have been thrown into question by your diverse environment.
During these two sessions, we have already encountered a series of situations where 'automatic' assumptions were questioned afterwards. We can take for example the first case from lesson one, where we had a team working exclusively from Brazil, but then saw that even in a situation like this, a high level of diversity was possible. Or take the case with Beibei, who has a Chinese name and possibly also appearance, but might identify much more with her Northern German birthplace. In the ‘zoom’ video we saw that the book the expat consulted before going abroad was written from a closed culture perspective, and led him to wrongly believe that everyone here would behave in a certain way. Automatic assumptions and behaviour make many things easier for us, and it is very challenging to live without them. However, it is still desirable to question them frequently, in order to appreciate the high level of diversity around us, negotiate openly, without prejudice, a new way of working that all parties can embrace, and allow the process to enrich us.
Last modified: Thursday, 25 April 2024, 3:08 PM