It’s not all about culture, or is it?

Recently a psychologist posted on a discussion board that I belong to asking How does culture affect positive psychology interventions, especially at work? 

It’s a great question and one that we can think of more broadly by asking – How does culture affect people at work?

You may be tempted to think that we leave our culture behind when we go to work.  Or that culture impacts on some isolated aspects at work – perhaps our communication preferences. 

As a coachee recently said to me – “this issue isn’t about culture Trisha, it’s about performance”. 

The reality is our culture influences everything.

It is the values and beliefs we hold that we aren’t aware of holding.  The things that help us see some things as right or wrong, or some things as polite while others are rude, some behaviours are admirable and to be emulated while others are embarrassing and to be avoided. 

Without unpacking and becoming aware of those values and beliefs we can’t see how we are being influenced.  Without considering how someone else’s beliefs might be influencing them we can’t begin to understand why they might be performing the way they are.

If we can bring a cultural lens to our thinking at work it gives us a significant advantage to understanding and working well with people from different locations, cultures, genders, and generations.

The difficulty in doing that is we now recognise that much of our psychological research is based on western populations.  The WEIRD research by Henrich et al (2010) showed us that 96% of subjects in experiments are drawn from populations that represent 10-15% of the world’s population. The results of these studies are often used to discuss generalised human behaviour including behaviour at work.  Yet the implications are not universal.

Different values and beliefs impact significantly on how we show up at work.  What we think is appropriate social behaviour, what motivates us, concepts of self - including self-esteem, agency, independence or inter-dependence to name a few.  Recently David Livermore tweeted ‘90% of leadership books assume a low power distance, individualist context. 70% of the world is high power distance and collectivist.’

We need to be able to bring that cultural lens to our working situations – and to do that we need cultural intelligence.