Abstract
Cultural differences in speech acts are common challenges in management involving Chinese and Western managers. Comparing four groups – Native-speaking Chinese, English-speaking Chinese, Chinese-speaking Westerners, and non-Chinese- speaking Westerners, we assessed the effects of language and ethnicity on the ability to predict communication obstacles in a management team scenario. Bilingual subjects were less likely to be influenced by ethnic biases. Still, bilinguals were not more likely to adjust their metacognitions about communication toward those of the native speakers. The study creates a link between management, cognition and linguistics, as well as having consequences for the study of metacognition in cross-cultural management.
Highlights
Communication plays a crucial role in management (Mintzberg, 2009), and it is even seen as what organization is “about” (Weick, 1995)
The aim of this study is to explore how differences in managerial communication may be influenced by cognitive structures related to language, but on a more profound level than what is covered by learning a foreign language (Henrich et al, 2010; Jentjens, 2021)
We have focused on one specific situation in which a Western expat CEO who has newly arrived in China tries to stimulate his top management team to an open exchange of viewpoints and ideas about the company’s present challenges
Summary
Communication plays a crucial role in management (Mintzberg, 2009), and it is even seen as what organization is “about” (Weick, 1995). The ability to understand these differences and have meta-cognitive perceptions of them may not develop until the speakers acquire almost native levels of mastery in the foreign language, and still cause misunderstandings among people who have business-level understanding of each other’s language (Wang et al, 2014; Beeler and Lecomte, 2017). This field of study is an important borderline between native and corporate cultures because most cultural obstacles need to be sorted out in verbal interaction for organizations to overcome them (Wilkinson et al, 2005; Pavlenko, 2016)
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