Managing Cultural Conflicts

Introduction

In the Global Communication Course, we have been talking abou how to manage cultural conflicts. This is a very important topic to address since we are living in a global village where multinationals are leaders of the buisiness wolrd. Employees sometimes have no choice but to accept the job they are offered in another country that is far much different than their own.

Different countries, means different languages, habits, ideologies, and hence, diffrent cultures.

In this regard we have talked in class about the low and high context culture and the individualist and collectivist cultures.

High Context vs Low Context

A high context cultures are the ones where people put the meaning in the context. Generally they are very implicit and Polychronic (they have no notion of the time and think they can perform many tasks in one time slot). In low context cultures, however, people tend to put the meaning in the message; consequently, they always say what they mean and mean what they say. In addition to this, they are Monochronic, and therfore, very punctual.

Individualis vs. Collectivists

As far as the individualist and collectivist societies are concerned, I have done a small research about this.

According to Raymie Stata (1992), “Collectivism holds that the group---the nation, the community, the proletariat, the race, etc.---is the primary unit of reality and the ultimate standard of value.” This view does not reject the individual but actually defines its role within a society via his/her relationships and interactions. Oppositely, individualism views the individual as “the primary unit of reality and the ultimate standard of value. This view does not deny that societies exist or that people benefit from living in them, but it sees society as a collection of individuals, not something over and above them.” Raymie Stata (1992).
In collectivist societies, ties between family members and friends are much stronger than in individualistic societies. The definition of keeping a good relationship with each other from a collectivist point of view differs from the individualist’s perspective. The former one requires knowing everything about each other, and sharing intimate information. The latter one, however, is more about interacting without argument.
From the aforementioned definition, and being Moroccan myself, I classify Morocco in the collectivist category. According to the Morocco Project Team Website, as shown in the following graph, Morocco is the collectivist one compared to the United States that depicts the perfect example of an individualistic culture. “The lower the ranking the more a country promotes individualism: independence”, and “The higher the rank, the more collectivist the country is” (Morocco Project Team).