International Organizational Behavior: Us & China

The United States and China:

The Roots of Cultural Misunderstandings

By

Today the United States and China enjoy a fruitful trading relationship which has blossomed along with China’s impressive growth in industrial outut. As mutually beneficial as this relationship is, it is still fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. Many of these misunderstandings arise as a result of inherent cultural qualities that each country takes for granted，both at a governmental level as well as at a personal level. While the cultural traits of each country are taken for granted by the citizens of each country, each side fails to understand how different these traits appear to others. It is unawareness of other cultures combined with an unwillingness to compromise that has created many of the trade and political problems that now plague both the US and China. If each country were to make an effort to understand and appreciate the cultural differences of the other side, I believe some, if not all of these differences and disputes could be resolved.

First of all I will discuss different cultural dimensions as defined by both Hofsted’s dimensions of cultural values and by the Chinese value survey. The combinations of both of these models for analysis of the Western-Chinese cultural divide is necessary to prevent any western bias from entering the final analysis, as Hofsted, who first completed his own value survey was himself born and raised in a western country. The cultural dimensions both surveys have in common are Individualism/Collectivism, Power distance, and Masculine/Feminine. The two unique dimensions from Hofsteds model and from the Chinese value survey, respectively, are: Uncertainty avoidance and Confucian work dynamism.

The Individualism/Collectivism dimension: The difference between whether a country can be defined as individualistic or collectivistic, centers mainly on whether or not the main concern of a society is based on...