Thursday, February 1, 2018

cross-cultural management styles

Really interesting article from the HBR on cross cultural management styles. I found it fascinating that Chinese workers regarded American managers as incompetent and arrogant because the American managers were not sufficiently directive:
“The most surprising comment from our Chinese colleagues,” one Chill Factor executive later explained, “was that we were perceived not just as incompetent but as arrogant, because we didn’t take the time to explain to our staff carefully and in detail what we wanted them to do and how.”
The Chinese employees' recommendations were:
  1. Before attending a meeting with your staff, prepare more ideas for yourself.
  2. Be more specific with directions to your employees.
  3. Have your own plan before allocating work to your subordinates.
Their expectation of a manager was that the manager came with the plan, provided clear direction, and oversaw execution. Coming up with a plan was not an employee function. I find that fascinating because I've been doing research on early careerists in healthcare administration and even these young people take it for granted that their bosses will only be giving them the vaguest direction and will expect them to figure out the vast majority of their work themselves.

I don't think this difference is just a cultural phenomenon, though I am sure there is an element of culture there. Instead, I think the main driver is the fact that the American economy is post-industrial, whereas China is, on average, still industrial. In the industrial economy, human beings are just organic cogs in a large corporate machine. This is especially true in low-wage countries where workers are plentiful and are substituted for physical machinery, where workers do repetitive tasks that do not require creativity. On average, any task that is repetitive in manufacturing has been replaced by a robot in the United States. That's why manufacturing jobs have plummeted in the US, while manufacturing output continues to grow. The workers left in manufacturing are there because their functions require creative problem solving, not repetitive work. A US a manager can't be as directive with creative workers, not because of preferences, but because by definition the manager doesn't have enough capacity to solve all the problems that her/his workers need to address. To the degree that Chinese workers still prefer to be directed as if they were human cogs is a cultural artifact linked more to the stage of their economy than their national culture, I believe.

Here's a link to the article, which is gated, and to a free podcast interview with one of the authors.

Article (gated): https://hbr.org/2017/07/being-the-boss-in-brussels-boston-and-beijing

Podcast (free): https://hbr.org/ideacast/2017/07/how-authority-and-decision-making-differ-across-cultures.html

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