American workways can sabotage communication

Staying on task and impersonal at work actually may be a barrier to productivity in today's multicultural business environment, a U-M researcher says.

Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a psychologist at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Business School, says a widespread American belief that personal relationships and emotions in the office are inappropriate and unprofessional may interfere with communication and ultimately with productivity.

"East Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern cultures tend to believe that social and emotional relationships are just as important at work as a relentless focus on the task at hand," Sanchez-Burks says. His most recent study focuses on what he calls Protestant Relational Ideology, or PRI—an affliction related to the Protestant work ethic, characterized by the expectation that one should be more impersonal and emotionally detached at work than in social situations. It appears in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Cultural differences in PRI play out at the office in ways that are as pervasive as they are subtle, Sanchez-Burks says, and they often involve indirect communication. Being indirect to save a colleague's feelings demonstrates a personal relationship. A blunt, say-it-like-it-is approach puts content above concern for the co-worker's emotional reaction.

With colleagues at U-M, Seoul National University in Korea and the International Business University in Nanjing, China, Sanchez-Burks has conducted a series of experiments showing how cross-cultural communication styles can fuel conflict and misunderstanding in a diverse workplace.

In one study, researchers found that European Americans were less attentive to indirect cues at work than they were in social situations, while East Asians were equally indirect at work and in non-work settings.

"Despite enormous differences in the nature of social relations across societies as diverse as Mexico, Japan and India, the U.S. may differ from each of them in reduced social emotionality in work settings," says Sanchez-Burks.

By creating informal environments where employees from different cultures can relax and socialize with each other in the office, and by offering plenty of chances for employees to get to know each other away from the office, organizations can help to reduce cross-cultural misunderstandings at work, Sanchez-Burks says.

These kinds of changes may be tough for hard-charging, all-work-and-no-play execs to swallow.

"For a very long time, PRI has been seen as essential to the success of Western business organizations," he says. "So it's difficult to accept that staying on-task may actually be a barrier to productivity in today's global business environment."

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