Why is it that in China it is always necessary to arrive on time or early if you are the guest? In the Muslim world why is Friday a day of rest? In Italy why should we avoid giving anything in a quantity of 17? We often have many such questions to put forth. When we try answering these we see that we land up in the same topic- CULTURE.
What is so unique about culture? What does culture got to do with people? What impact does culture have on human beings?
Where does culture play an important role? Where do you see the greatest value? Where do you feel the biggest challenge?
Who is the most affected person? Who needs to know about culture?
How do we overcome cross cultural barriers? How do we get to know about various cultures?
When will these cultural diversities affect us? When are we supposed to learn about these cultural differences?
I am sure all of us will have these questions in mind. Is culture so special that we need to talk about it? Its only after attending this course CCM in my final quarter at DoMS did I realize the importance of culture.
Moving on…….
From what I have learnt from the course I feel culture is a set of values, beleifs, thoughts and norms followed by people belonging to a particular community. People behave in a particular way in order to belong to a group. When we are born we tend to learn things from people around us. We see that people around us behave in a certain way and we tend to follow it. However our experiences also influence our behavior.
We feel connected to a particular group because we tend to behave in a certain way, tend to dress in a particular way, and we share the same thoughts towards various things.
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Like all courses even CCM had various theories and concepts to deal with. The most famous being Hofstede's model and Trompenaar's model and Hall's model. All of them talk about their frameworks for culture.
Hofstede’s model
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Trompenaar’s model
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Hall’s model
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Power distance
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Relationship with people
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High/low context communication
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Uncertainty avoidance
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Relationship with environment
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Space: physical/personal
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Individualism- collectivism
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Time
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Monocronic and polycronic time orientation
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Masculinity- Feminity
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Long-term/ short-term orientation
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These models give us an outline to classify cultures in a broad perspective. However it is very difficult to force fit cultures into these models. I strongly feel that these can be used as a guide to look at culture; however these cannot be used as strict rules to classify them.
The course I attended was indeed cross- cultural. We had many exchange students in the class and I had good opportunity to work with different people for different assignment. The small group projects helped me in learning how to work in cross cultural teams. I have always had this stereotyped notion that working with exchange students is not all that pleasant experience. But after this course I learnt that its fun working with them. I also realized that having a team that is cross cultural adds a lot of value to the team spirit. We were able to make decisions better and things progressed well as against the working with our own friends. (Now we know why large companies have cross-cultural teams for major projects!)
We had four guest lectures during the course. The speakers were from the industry with good experience. We learned a lot about other countries and their culture. The lectures helped us understand the importance of cross-cultural management in the work setup. We had good interactions with the speakers. In a work setting it is especially important to know other cultures because it has many repercussions on the business dealings. For instance Americans usually don’t work on weekends and if you are a team lead working with an American counterpart, sure you would land up in trouble if you schedule meetings on weekends. However Indians don’t mind working on weekends. Such small cultural difference have impact on our relationships with people (be it in work-set up or otherwise). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrJTf97Ev8o, http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=WcEfzHB08QE&feature=endscreen. We can get to know more by reading about different culture. This site gives us a lot of information on different countries which can be used to learn more about other countries and their culture. http://www.cyborlink.com/.
From what I have learnt from the course I fell that culture affects and molds us in every stage of our life. Our friends, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances are all mostly people from other culture. Thus we can never say that culture affects us only at work.
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Flavor for thought…..
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