Diversity In Business And Overcoming Prejudice

Being Globally-Minded Makes You Better At Business?

Does being Globally-minded, and having an appreciation of cultures beyond your own, affect your bottom line? In this era of globalization, where many of us deal with people from all over the world in our working life, the obvious answer is yes: by understanding others better, shouldn't cooperating with them be easier?

Indeed, that's exactly what a Harvard Business School study found. The more time someone had spent abroad, the study revealed, the better they were at negotiating business deals cross-culturally. Specifically, Asian interpersonal communication styles and American communication styles differ vastly. People from the US are notoriously no-nonsense, directly getting to the point in a way that sometimes offends people from other cultures. The Asian concept of "saving face", meanwhile, and the tendency to view communication with others in a society-wide context rather than just an individual context, leads to more polite and indirect communication that some westerners find hard to understand. 

Not being able to handle cross-cultural communication well can easily spell the end of an important business relationship. The good news, however, is that merely spending time in another country with a significantly different collective communication style improves your ability to navigate these challenges. 

But What About Prejudice?

Numerous studies have shown that prejudice towards people belonging to other groups is a pretty inherent human characteristic. We're weary of outsiders, and have traditionally tended to judge whether someone was "ours" or "other" in a split second by looking at their appearance. 

READ Collective Cultural Memory: Whole Societies, Not Just Individuals, Can Forget

A study led by Jan van Bavel from New York University showed that the initial prejudice responses to people of other races in the brain are perhaps impossible to eliminate completely (though more exposure to diverse groups of people does lessen it). However, when you put people into teams and ask them to assess the nature of people on the same team vs the opposing team, the amgygdala — the feeling-processing center of the brain — spends more time on opponents. In other words, we trust those who are on the same team more. Perhaps we should try to remember that as humans, we're all really one big team.