EDO 818 Module 4 Psychological Foundations of Cultural Behavior Example

The Root Cause Was Not in the Report: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Behavior Behind Three Misunderstandings at a Multinational Manufacturer

Student Name

Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDO 818: Leading Across Contexts and Cultures

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Root Cause Was Not in the Report: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Behavior Behind Three Misunderstandings at a Multinational Manufacturer

Clearbrook Water Systems, an invented filtration manufacturer, runs its quality and recognition systems from its Saint Paul headquarters for plants in Minnesota, Brno and Penang. Three misunderstandings keep recurring. Penang's root cause reports are returned as incomplete because they describe the circumstances around a defect instead of naming a single cause. Brno engineers refuse to adopt informal workarounds that Minnesota engineers use to keep lines running, which headquarters reads as rigidity. And a recognition program that names a top individual performer each quarter embarrassed several of its Penang winners, two of whom asked not to be named again. This paper uses research on the psychological foundations of cultural behavior to explain these patterns. The company and its incidents are invented, and cultural tendencies are averages from which individuals vary.

Culture and the Self

Markus and Kitayama (1991) argued that people in different cultures hold strikingly different construals of the self. An independent view of the self, common in North America and Western Europe, sees the person as a bounded, unique individual defined by internal attributes such as abilities and preferences, and values standing out and expressing oneself. An interdependent view, more common in many Asian cultures, sees the person as connected to others and defined by relationships and roles, and values fitting in, maintaining harmony and attending to others. These construals, they showed, influence cognition, emotion and motivation, including what people find rewarding and what makes them uncomfortable.

The recognition program assumed an independent self. Naming one employee as the quarter's top performer rewards standing out from the group. For employees holding a more interdependent view, being singled out above teammates can feel like a disruption of relationships rather than an honor, which fits the Penang winners' reactions.

Culture and Thought

Nisbett et al. (2001) reviewed evidence that people from East Asian and Western cultures tend to differ in their systems of thought. Analytic thinking, more common among Westerners in their studies, focuses on objects and their attributes, assigns them to categories and explains events through rules about the objects themselves. Holistic thinking, more common among East Asians studied, attends to the whole field, to relationships between objects and their context, and explains events by reference to the situation, tolerating contradiction. The authors traced these differences to social practices and long histories, and noted that they appeared in perception, attribution and reasoning.

The root cause dispute fits this research. Headquarters' template asks for a single root cause, an analytic approach that isolates one factor. Penang's reports describe the interplay of humidity, a new operator, a supplier lot and a schedule change, a holistic account in which the defect arose from the situation. Neither is simply wrong; complex defects often do have several interacting causes, and the holistic report may be more complete.

Tight and Loose Norms

Gelfand et al. (2011) measured the tightness or looseness of thirty-three nations, defined as the strength of social norms and the degree of sanctioning for deviance. Tight nations had stronger norms and less tolerance for deviant behavior; loose nations had weaker norms and more tolerance. Tightness was associated with ecological and historical threats, such as high population density, resource scarcity and disease, and with institutions that constrain behavior. In everyday situations, people in tighter nations reported a narrower range of appropriate behavior. Malaysia ranked among the tightest nations in the study, and the United States toward the looser end.

Tightness helps explain two incidents. In Penang, tighter norms about appropriate behavior in work settings may heighten discomfort at being singled out. In Brno, the engineers' insistence on documented procedures may reflect a combination of national norms about rules, which Module 1 linked to higher uncertainty avoidance, and professional norms in quality engineering. Minnesota's informal workarounds look like common sense in a relatively loose setting and like a breach of norms in a tighter one.

Whose Psychology?

Henrich et al. (2010) reviewed comparative research and argued that most findings in psychology and behavioral science come from samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies, which they called WEIRD, and that these samples are often unusual compared with the rest of humanity on measures from visual perception to fairness and reasoning. They cautioned against treating such findings as universal.

The critique applies to headquarters as much as to research. Clearbrook's practices were designed by and for people who think in analytic terms, prefer to stand out and tolerate improvisation. Those preferences are not the human default; they are one cultural pattern among several.

Variation Within the Sites

None of the three incidents involved everyone at a site. Two of Penang's eight quality engineers write reports in the analytic style headquarters expects, both trained at universities in Australia, and one of the Penang recognition winners said she was pleased to be named. In Brno, a younger engineer argued in favor of the workaround before the team decided against it. And in Saint Paul, several veteran quality staff said privately that they, too, found the single-cause template too narrow. The research describes tendencies that help explain patterns, but each pattern contains people who think otherwise, and practices should leave room for them.

Changes to How Headquarters Works

Conclusion

Each misunderstanding arose when a practice built on one cultural psychology met another. Markus and Kitayama explain why individual recognition can embarrass, Nisbett and colleagues why a report about context can look incomplete to analytic readers, Gelfand and colleagues why workarounds trouble people in tighter settings and Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan why headquarters should not mistake its own habits for universal ones. Small changes to templates, procedures and recognition let the sites work together without asking any of them to think like Saint Paul.

References

Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C., Duan, L., Almaliach, A., Ang, S., Arnadottir, J., Aycan, Z., Boehnke, K., Boski, P., Cabecinhas, R., Chan, D., Chhokar, J., D'Amato, A., Subirats Ferrer, M., Fischlmayr, I. C., ... Yamaguchi, S. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332(6033), 1100-1104. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1197754

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224-253. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224

Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291-310. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.2.291