Bukky Post 18 - 2-20 Assignment

1.) Which type of culture has a stronger impact on the workplace behavior: Societal culture or Organizational culture? Why?

Based on my experience from my years in corporate America, I would say organizational culture.
It is very vivid in my current place of employment. There are certain norms that are so ingrained in the employees, especially those that have been with the company for a why, it is comical at time. They expect things to be done a certain way, most of the promotion occurs by who you know not what you know, the Sr. leadership has been an old boy's network, but this is changing as a result of the changes being made by the new female ceo.
Organizational culture has the greater impact because over the course of time people within the organization come to an unspoken or spoken agreement as to what is acceptable/not acceptable behavior and people that do not play by the rules will be penalized one way or the other. They quickly learn to fall in line.

2.) Provide an example of a behaviour in high context culture and low context culture

High Context Culture: In the Chinese or Japanese culture, a hand shake on a usiness deal is good as gold. They have given their word and do not a legal contract to fulfill their committment.
In the African culture, a business partner would be invited out for drinks or to the person's home to eat with the family to establish a social relationship before doing business.

Low Context: American culture where everything has to be written down in order to have evidence in case of a court case of what the othe party agreed to.
In American culture, the more letters you have behind your name, the easier it is to sell a candidate for a job because they believe they have the expertise and will perform highly at the job.

3.) Contact a person who is in the US from China. Seek their input on any instance of ethnocentric bias they experienced while in the US.

My contact experienced a bias in the sense of constantly being told he spoke excellent english unlike most Chinese and people always wanted to know if he learnt english here in the US. He already spoke fluent english before coming to the US.

4.) Is China's culture polychronic or monochronic? Justify your answer.

China's culture is monochronic. The Chinese take committments seriously, they are committed to the job - work long hours, adhere religiously to plans - chinese are raised within structure and tend not to be individualistic or think for themselves, they obey authority, they are concerned about not distrubing others; follow rules of privacy and consideration, emphasize promptness, they are low context and need information.
These are all characteristics of a monochronic people.

In a polychronic culture peole like to preform multiple task at once. examples include talking on the phone while you are driving or browsing the internet why you are in a meeting. The American culture is an example of a polychronic culture. Most people are expected to multi task at work in order to meet deadlines or be able to complete additional duties assigned to them.

5.) What is Guaxi? Explain with an example from your workplace.

Wikipedia:
Guanxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central idea in Chinese society. In Western media, the pinyin romanization of this Chinese word is becoming more widely used instead of the two common translations—"connections" and "relationships"—as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide cultural implications that guanxi describes.[citation needed]
Closely related concepts include that of ganqing, a measure which reflects the depth of feeling within an interpersonal relationship, renqing, the moral obligation to maintain the relationship, and the idea of "face", meaning social status, propriety, prestige, or more realistically a combination of all three
At its most basic, guanxi describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. The two people need not be of equal social status. Guanxi can also be used to describe a network of contacts, which an individual can call upon when something needs to be done, and through which he or she can exert influence on behalf of another. In addition, guanxi can describe a state of general understanding between two people: "he/she is aware of my wants/needs and will take them into account when deciding her/his course of future actions which concern or could concern me without any specific discussion or request".
The term is not generally used to describe relationships within a family, although guanxi obligations can sometimes be described in terms of an extended family. The term is also not generally used to describe relationships that fall within other well-defined societal norms (e.g. boss-worker, teacher-student, friendship). The relationships formed by guanxi are personal and not transferable.
When a guanxi network violates bureaucratic norms, it can lead to corruption, and guanxi can also form the basis of patron-client relations.
The most common response to indicate acceptance of an apology in Standard Mandarin is mei guanxi (沒關係 ) which literally translated to "doesn't have guanxi [implications]". This is however an homonym usage of the phrase "guanxi". In this instance, mei guanxi (沒關係 ) actually means, "Don't worry about it."
Guanxi is most often used in the press when guanxi obligations take precedence over civic duties, leading to nepotism and cronyism
Someone is described as having good guanxi if their particular network of influence could assist in the resolution of the problem currently being spoken about.

My director has a lot of Guanxi within the IT Group. We recently had a sutuation where we were requiring another division to adhere to a new policy training and they refused because they felt the requirement was not applicable to them.
My direction had a conversation with the VP and they then had a conversation with the CIO and before you knew it this other division agreed to take the training based on the influence that was exerted on them.