Do you remember The Dress? I love showing this image to groups and watching the arguments ensue.
If you have not encountered it before, show it to a few friends and ask them what colors they see. Be prepared to hear things like, “Are you crazy? What is wrong with your eyes? There is no blue at all!” or “There is no white at all!”
Why does this happen? Our brains make different automatic assumptions about lighting and shadows, leading people to stable but very different interpretations of the colors they see (Lafer-Sousa et al., 2015).
I use this image because it helps people recognize that we often move through life in a state of naive realism: the false assumption that other reasonable people see things the same way we do (Ross & Ward, 1996).
What Does This Have to Do With Culture?
Culture shapes our worldview in powerful ways. It may not literally make us see different colors, although some researchers argue that culture can influence perception. It certainly shapes our values, our likes and dislikes, and what we consider normal or polite.
To build strong, amicable professional relationships across cultures, we need to recognize those differences and avoid cognitive traps that can divide us.
Cultural Forces That Divide Us
Along with naive realism, several common cognitive processes can limit our ability to empathize with, connect with, and understand others across real or perceived cultural differences.
Cognitive Processes That Create Division
- Naive realism: My view of the world is the truest and most accurate.
- Universal standards: Everyone shares my standards for what is normal, polite, logical, and professional.
- In-group favoritism: My country, community, or sports team is the best. We see our members as unique individuals, and often attribute our mistakes to outside factors.
- Out-group bias: Members of another country, community, or sports team all behave and think the same way. We treat their mistakes as evidence of their personalities.
We compress outsiders into stereotypes while preserving the nuance of our own group. We gravitate toward people who feel familiar and may inadvertently distance ourselves from “others.” When someone violates our norms, we may assume the worst instead of recognizing that people hold different expectations about what is logical, polite, professional, or normal.
Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map provides a framework for comparing relative cultural tendencies across several areas of business interaction (Meyer, 2014). The graphic below shows seven of those dimensions.
How Different Expectations Become Tension
These scales describe broad, relative tendencies, not how every individual from a culture will behave. They are most useful as questions to explore rather than labels to attach to colleagues.
- Communicating: low-context or high-context. In low-context communication, the message is expected to be explicit: responsibilities are stated, conclusions are documented, and important points may be repeated. In high-context communication, more meaning is carried through implication, shared understanding, and what remains unsaid. One person may experience a colleague as frustratingly vague, while the colleague experiences them as unnecessarily repetitive or even distrustful.
- Evaluating: direct or indirect negative feedback. “This section does not work; rewrite it” may signal efficiency and intellectual honesty to one person, but disrespect or public humiliation to another. The opposite misunderstanding also occurs. Carefully softened feedback such as “Perhaps this could be revisited” may be intended as serious criticism but interpreted as an optional suggestion.
- Leading: egalitarian or hierarchical. Using first names, speaking casually with senior leaders, and openly challenging their ideas may demonstrate confidence and engagement in an egalitarian setting. In a more hierarchical setting, the same behavior may appear presumptuous or disrespectful. Conversely, silence in front of a leader may indicate deference rather than agreement. A leader who invites candid input may receive little because team members expect the leader to provide direction.
- Deciding: consensual or top-down. Leadership style and decision-making style are not the same. A leader may behave informally while still expecting to make the final decision, or appear highly authoritative while investing considerable time in building consensus. People accustomed to consensus may interpret a quick decision as exclusionary; those accustomed to top-down decisions may experience extended consultation as indecision. Teams should therefore clarify who will be consulted, who will decide, and whether a decision can later be reopened.
- Trusting: task-based or relationship-based. In task-based cultures, trust develops through competence, reliability, and delivering good work. Moving immediately to the agenda may therefore communicate professionalism. In relationship-based cultures, trust develops through personal knowledge and time spent together. Beginning negotiations before building that relationship may feel cold or opportunistic. What one colleague considers unnecessary small talk may be the process through which another decides whether collaboration is safe.
- Disagreeing: confrontational or confrontation-avoiding. Some teams treat open disagreement as evidence that people are taking the problem seriously; a vigorous argument does not necessarily damage the relationship. Elsewhere, public disagreement may threaten dignity, harmony, or “face.” Concerns may instead be raised privately or communicated indirectly. Silence, or “We will consider it,” should not automatically be interpreted as agreement.
- Scheduling: linear-time or flexible-time. For someone with a linear approach, punctuality, sequential plans, and fixed deadlines demonstrate respect and reliability. Repeatedly changing priorities or arriving late may imply that the work is not valued. For someone with a flexible approach, adapting the schedule to new events, urgent needs, or important relationships may be entirely responsible. Rigidly protecting a timetable can appear unhelpful or insensitive to what is happening around the team.
Ignoring differences in values, beliefs, and norms can create damaging assumptions and resentments that erode collaboration, especially when culture interacts with leader-follower dynamics or collaborations across distance.
Forces That Unite Us Across Cultures
Get to Know Individuals
There is only so much you can understand about a person by looking at their passport. Cross-cultural classifications can become sophisticated ways to stereotype people if we do not see beyond them. Assuming that they apply universally, regardless of personality, family, generation, or other influences, will not help us build meaningful relationships. Used carefully, however, these questions can open conversations that help us understand one another.
Team Members Can Assess Their Own Cultural Preferences
Then, as a team, ask: Where do we differ? What challenges might arise, or have already arisen, because of our different expectations or preferences?
Build Microcultures Using Team Charters
Teams can quickly create new microcultures by reinforcing shared expectations, norms, rules, and social identities within their professional collaborations.
By discussing differences openly, we can move from understanding how our backgrounds have shaped us as individuals to agreeing on how we want to behave as a team. Team charters are living documents that let people specify what respectful feedback looks like, how decisions will be made, and how conflicting opinions will be handled.
Charters can be adapted to address areas where a team anticipates friction, whether those relate to cultural differences, distance, or the use of technology.
Build Psychological Safety
Opening a conversation about cultural differences can be delicate, and it is easier when the team is psychologically safe. Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 1999). In cross-cultural collaboration, that risk might involve clarifying an assumption, speaking in a way that falls outside one’s cultural norms, or making a suggestion without knowing how it will be received.
Psychological safety can help team members assume the best of one another. When cross-cultural friction arises, people may be less likely to assume the worst.
Tools such as Otis AI can assess whether team members feel psychologically safe and help them collectively build behaviors that strengthen that safety.
References
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Lafer-Sousa, R., Hermann, K. L., & Conway, B. R. (2015). Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by “the dress” photograph. Current Biology, 25(13), R545–R546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.053
Meyer, E. (2014). The culture map: Breaking through the invisible boundaries of global business. PublicAffairs. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/erin-meyer/the-culture-map/9781610392594/
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In E. S. Reed, E. Turiel, & T. Brown (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stahl, G. K., Maznevski, M. L., Voigt, A., & Jonsen, K. (2010). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A meta-analysis of research on multicultural work groups. Journal of International Business Studies, 41(4), 690–709. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2009.85