Navigating Our Multicultural Workplace: Best Practices for Intercultural Communication — Epoche B2
NOTICE TO ALL STAFF — 04/2024 From: People & Culture, Regional Office, Singapore To: All staff, all sites Date of issue: 8 April 2024 Subject: Intercultural communication guidance and briefing sessions Action required: read; attend one session; new joiners to complete before the end of week two Following the project review in March, the regional team recorded five delivery delays traceable to misunderstandings between offices rather than to technical problems. In each case, one side believed a decision had been agreed and the other believed it was still open. This notice sets out the guidance agreed in response, explains why each item is expected to work, and announces the briefing sessions at which it will be discussed. Because guidance of this kind can slide into stereotype, section 2 states plainly what the underlying research does and does not license anyone to assume about a colleague. 1. What the review found, and how firmly The five cases were identified retrospectively by the review team from project records and follow-up interviews at both ends of each delay. That method has a known weakness and staff should hold the finding accordingly: when a cause is assigned after the fact, the explanation that makes the sequence intelligible tends to be the one selected, and communication is an unusually easy explanation to reach for. What raises confidence here is the consistency of the pattern rather than the count. In all five, the same asymmetry appeared — one office recorded the matter as settled, the other recorded it as outstanding — and in all five the party recording it as settled was the party that had spoken last. The clearest instance concerned a design that was built for three weeks after the Ho Chi Minh City team had, in their own terms, already declined it. Reading the record back, the decline is present. It takes the form of questions about feasibility, a remark that the schedule would be demanding, and no restatement of support when support had been offered earlier. None of that registered at the other end as refusal, because at the other end refusal is expected to arrive as a sentence with 'no' in it. 2. Why a refusal may not contain the word: the mechanism, and its limits The underlying idea is face: a person's public standing in an interaction, both their claim to be well regarded and their claim not to be imposed upon. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's account of politeness treats certain acts — refusing, correcting, contradicting — as intrinsically damaging to face, and predicts that the heavier the damage, the more indirect the form in which the act is performed. Stella Ting-Toomey's face-negotiation theory develops this for conflict specifically: styles of handling disagreement differ in whether the speaker gives priority to protecting their own face, the other party's, or the relationship's, and where the other party's face and the group's standing take priority, disagreement is more likely to be expressed by avoiding, deferring or qualifying than by direct opposition. On that account, colleagues in the Vietnamese office who register disagreement indirectly — protecting the group's position rather than opposing a named individual — are not failing to communicate. They are performing a refusal in a form that carries a lower cost to everyone present, and it is fully legible to those who share the convention. A second factor is the seniority gradient. Geert Hofstede's work on organisational culture identified a dimension he called power distance: the extent to which less powerful members of an organisation expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. Where power distance is high, contradicting a senior person in front of others is a heavier act than it is elsewhere, so it will be performed more indirectly or not at all. The Southeast Asian countries in Hofstede's data score comparatively high on this dimension; Malaysia has the highest score in his original dataset. That sentence is the one most likely to be misused, so its basis needs stating. Hofstede's scores were derived from employee attitude surveys conducted inside a single corporation, IBM, between roughly 1967 and 1973, and they are country averages. An average tells you about the distribution, not about the person in front of you: inferring an individual's behaviour from a group mean is the error known as the ecological fallacy, and Hofstede himself warned against it repeatedly. Nothing in this notice licenses anyone to predict how a named colleague will behave from the office they sit in. What the research licenses is the design of meetings that work whichever convention the participants happen to follow — which is what the guidance in section 5 is for. 3. Why the change of question worked What corrected the March problem was not a rule but a change of question. 'Do you agree?' invites a yes. 'What would need to change before this would work at your end?' does not. This is not merely a matter of tone. Survey methodology has demonstrated for decades that the distribution of answers is a property of the question as much as of the respondents. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser ran a long series of split-ballot experiments in which matched halves of a sample received differently worded versions of the same item; the best-known result is that far more Americans would 'not allow' public speeches against democracy than would 'forbid' them, although the two are logically the same. Two of their general findings bear on our case. First, closed questions constrain answers to the alternatives offered, and open questions elicit substantially different distributions from the same people. Second, agreement is the cheap answer: a question inviting assent draws assent from respondents who are uncertain, uninterested or unwilling to contradict, a tendency stronger where the questioner has more standing than the respondent. A closed confirmation therefore produces a 'yes' that is weak evidence of agreement, beca