Leaders in business and non-profit organizations increasingly work across national boarders and in multi-cultural environments. You may work regularly with customers or suppliers abroad, or be part of a globally dispersed cross-functional team, or an expatriate manager on an international assignment. You may be a member of a global online community, or a development aid worker collaborating with an international network of partner organizations. In all of these contexts, your effectiveness as a leader depends on how well you understand and are able to manage individual and collective behaviors in an intercultural context. In this course – together with a team of Bocconi expert faculty and Bocconi alumni – we’ll explore the theory and practice of international and intercultural leadership and organizational behavior. Social science research has revealed systematic ways in which our behavior differs across cultural contexts – enabling us to more effectively work across borders. Insights from psychology, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology, from communication studies and from management scholarship allow us to understand what shapes individual and group decision making, what enhances or weakens team performance, and how we can build and use our social networks. And the shared practical experience of international leaders allows us to identify concrete steps to enhancing intercultural leadership competence, and to be cognizant of common leadership challenges. Learning about organizational behavior provides a great opportunity to develop your leadership skills and to reflect on your own behavioral tendencies. How do you usually make important decisions? What motivates you and how do you try motivating others? How successfully do you leverage and integrate diverse skills and views in a team? Do you prefer professional relationships with a close-knit group of trusted colleagues, or with a far-flung network of acquaintances from all walks of life? If you really want to learn how organizations behave and take decisions and at the same time develop leadership skills, then this is the course for you. We are looking forward to welcoming you and supporting you on this journey of learning and discovery. COURSE SYLLABUS Week 1 - Leadership Acumen. International perspective on leadership, common traps & challenges, and opportunities of intercultural leadership. Week 2 - Navigating Culture. Impact of cultural differences on organizations, decoding culture, culture classifications and stereotyping, developing intercultural intelligence. Week 3 - Communication. Communication and its impact on leadership identity and relationships, managing communication to improve decision making, steps for developing your intercultural communication skills. Week 4 - Motivation. Views on individual motivation, cultural differences in motivation, developing motivation and commitment in teams. Week 5 - Networking. Patterns of interpersonal relationships in/across organizations, strategically developing social networks and social capital, norms for networking across cultures. Week 6 - Conflict. Effective / defective conflict management approaches, dealing with ethical dilemmas. Thanks to the participation of our alumni and of the Bocconi Alumni Association, participants will have practical insights on international leadership. RECOMMENDED BACKGROUND All are welcome! Some prior exposure to basic issues of organizational behavior (communication, decision making, motivation, etc.) is useful, but not required.
3. Identity & Relationships - Part 1
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Liderança e Comportamento Organizacional
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COMMUNICATING EFFECTIVELY
Almost everything international leaders do, they do through communication. In an international context, they often encounter communication barriers when they interact with followers, peers, and partners from other cultures. We talk about how to encourage open, respectful, and productive conversations for improving collaboration and collective decision-making. We will also closely examine the role of communication for leaders' identity and their relationships with others. Bocconi alumni who have accumulated many years of international experience share with us what they have learned about intercultural communication and how to develop your communication skills.
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Franz WohlgezogenAssistant Professor
Department of Management and Technology
The way that we've talked about communication so far, has emphasized that
help is exchanged information, qualifiers, claims, and appeals.
And because of that exchange, we use it to help make sense of the world around us.
We've used uncertainty about what matters,
what's going on, reduce equivocality, all of that.
So if you think about it when we say you know let's talk about it,
it's not just for entertainment purposes, right?
>> There's something to say, we want to get to some point.
>> Exactly right, we want to make progress in some sense, learn something,
work through something.
And this productive notion, working with factual information,
why that's really important for communication.
That's why you need a healthy communication culture and
effective communication routines, especially in a intercultural context.
But if we focus only on those elements, right, this exchange of objective,
neutral impersonal information, we would be missing a whole lot of
what is really going on also in communication, right?
>> It's kind of dull, too.
>> Yeah, you could say it's dull.
But you're onto something because it is actually those other parts do make
communication richer, but they also make it more complex, and more complicated,
especially in the cultural context.
And it's those other parts that in a situation where you're dealing
with other cultures, where you deal with language barriers,
that it can really impact yourself and the relationship that you have with others.
That's what I want to focus on in this part,
is those other dimensions of communication that we haven't talked about so far.
To make sense of these other dimensions of communication,
other than the fact that I want to suggest a framework,
this is something that I have learned over many years ago.
Somebody suggested it to me and it's been very helpful for me.
Comes from a German psychologist called Friedemann Schulz von Thun.
There's a.
>> That's a name.
>> German name for you, exactly.
And what the framework suggests is that there's four dimensions to communication.
And two of those dimensions, we already talked about to some degree.
And that's the factual dimension and the appeal dimension, right?
So you're communicating certain pieces of information, fact.
And you do that to have a certain effect.
>> Much like concrete ones.
>> That's concrete, right?
So, it's objective in many ways.
Still can be misunderstood, but that's the information, the factual side.
Then again, you might do that to prompt a reaction, to prompt action.
That's the appeal side.
But there's two other dimensions, and that is the self statement and
the relationship statement.
So you're saying something about yourself and you communicate it with another
person and you say something about what you think about them or
what do you think about the relationship that you have with them.
And those two parts are what
we could call kind of the social performance in the communication.
This is how we construct relationships, right, social relationships.
This is how we position ourselves in those relationships.
So that's the idea, that's the self statement, and the relationship statement.
And these two things are also connected to a concept
that I am sure you're familiar with, and that is the concept of face, right?
We often associate that kind of with that with Asian countries, right?
That there is a lot of attention to >> Respect to this
level in the society that you're in.
>> Exactly right. So
it has something to do with hierarchies in society, so the amount of status and
respect that you attribute to a person or to yourself.
And that is something that happens all the time, not just in Asia,
that's a universal thing.
In all cultures we do that, we might call it differently.
But this is what sociologists call kind of face-work in interaction,
we constantly maintain, increase, or lose, potentially, face, right?
So we lose, status, or respect in interaction.
And that's something, losing face, is something that nobody wants.
Clearly, nobody in their sane mind wants to look bad, wants to be ridiculed,
wants to lose respect so it's an important area.
Again, everybody cares about that.
It's universal, but how exactly in
various cultural contents we actually do this kind of face-work that that differs.
But it's very much connected to these two dimensions of self-disclosure and
relationship statement.
Let's talk about an example though.
Okay.
>> So, for these four dimensions, very simple situation.
Two people sit in a car.
She's driving, he's sitting on the passenger seat.
They stand at a cross-section.
The light turns from red to green, and he says, the light is green.
>> Okay.
>> Okay?
Factual statement?
>> The light is now green.
>> Exactly.
Appeal?
Go.
>> Yeah, so.
>> Green means go.
>> Green means go.
So I give you this information because I want you to drive.
But the interesting parts often are in the other two dimensions,
which is self disclosure and relationship statement.
So what do you think is going on there?
>> Self disclosure could be I don't wanna wait anymore.
>> I'm impatient, exactly, I'm impatient and the integration statement.
>> Maybe he's saying he's a better driver than here or
he's helping her in this moment because he thinks that.
>> She needs help right.
So there's this kind of authority kind of thing going on there.
And clearly she might reject that to some degree, that he's a better driver or
that he has that authority over her to tell her what to do.
Yeah so even in very simple, seemingly innocuous statements we have those four
dimensions, the facts, the appeal, self statement, and the relationship statement.
So we speak with four tongues, if you will.
That's what Friedemann calls it.
We have these four tongues in our mouth and they always have these dimensions and
also we tried to deliberately communicate on those dimensions, but
also might slip in.
We might not intend to say something, but it comes off that way.
So imagine you're in the course, one of my University course,
in the first session, first day of class I come in and
say, I was told by the administration that I have to teach this course.
>> You're probably not that willing to teach it.
>> Yeah, it sounds like it.
I might not intend that, but I might unwittingly kind of communicate that.
That could be the challenge.
That's some of the vagary,
some of the ambiguities, of communication of the encoding side.
Putting something in to what I'm trying to transfer to you.
So decoding means that not only do we speak with four tongues, but
we also with four ears, right?
So, imagine the following situation.
I come running to you, very excited, and I say, did you hear Mike and
Jane had this huge fallout,
this huge argument about who is going to present the project at the convention.
So again in the statement you can pick up different things,
where you can listen to it with four ears.
So if you listen to it with a factual ear, how would you respond?
>> What happened?
or who won?
[LAUGH] I want more details.
>> Who won who won!
So you wanna know more details.
You wanna know more facts.
So that's your response.
The conversation would take that turn, right?
You would actually focus on the factual side.
If you listen to it from an appeal ear, what would you, how would you react?
>> Why are you telling me this?
>> Exactly. >> So what do you want from me,
what should I do?
>> What should I do about it, right?
Or you might, immediately response, okay, let me see what I can find, what I can do,
because you're assuming that I tell you because I want you to
do something about it.
Okay, so that's two so how about the self disclosure, right?
So you were listening to what I'm disclosing about myself.
>> It sounds like you know this may be and
you shouldn't know it because it sounds like a secret.
>> Yeah.
So maybe I'm showing off that I'm having these secrets so you could interpret that.
>> Or maybe you're related in some way emotionally to one of the two people.
>> Exactly I could be affected by this, so your response could be a kiss.
How does it make you feel?
What are your concerns?
Are you worried?
Something like that.
And for the relationships statement,
if you listened with that ear, what would your response be?
>> You have some trust in me.
You're telling me something.
>> Yeah, thank you for confiding in me.
Or, negatively, you could reject it.
Why do you think I want to hear that gossip?
Because you don't like what I'm insinuating about our relationship.
So people that have this very intense ear for self disclosure or
relationship statement, they're usually empathetic.
We usually think of that as a good thing, but it goes to extremes.
It can drive you nuts right?
So if I give you negative criticism or
critique of homework or presentation that you gave me,
and the only response that you give me is, okay so tell me how you really feel right?
You're not really listening to the fact that I'm trying to convey.
>> Or I think you just hate me now.
>> Yeah exactly.
So you're not really listening to the fact.
That can drive people nuts as well, right?
So it can go overboard.
And same for the appeal.
Some people are so intent on hearing, always, a hidden agenda, a hidden appeal.
So again, kind of old joke, couple sits at the table.
And he, they're eating soup, he looks at the soup and
says, what is that green stuff in my soup?
So one way to react to this is to really answer the question, but
in the joke of course would be, honey if you don't like eating my food,
why don't you go somewhere else?
So because what she heard is basically the appeal leave out that green stuff or
the hidden appeal I don't like your food, cook something else.
>> Which may or may not.
>> Which might not have been the intention right?
So that's what happens, right, in the decoding essentially.
So these tendencies to hear a particular dimension of the message can
be idiosyncratic or
it can be gender based, but often they are also national culture based.
So I made the experience that as a foreigner in a culture that you don't know
very often, you often kind of take old people's relationship ear,
if you like because you're violating, unwillingly often, you're violating
expectations what is an appropriate relationship in a particular context.
When I moved to the US, you know this idea of too much information, right?
>> TMI >> TMI and that is the relationship
issue right because you have the feeling that you're getting information that is
inappropriate for the kind of relationship that you think you want to have or
that you have for the person.
So you will say stop, right?
And I had a similar experience, again, on the relational dimension,
when I was teaching in Asia.
One of the first gigs that I had there was a pan-Asian group, so
people from different countries, and
I was suggesting that everyone introduce themselves on a first-name basis.
So people from India, Pakistan, China, introduce themselves, Hi,
my name is Ding Shang, you can call me Dave.
And then we came to the Japanese colleagues, and
they all introduced themselves with their last name.
My name is Nakamura and you can call me Nakamura Son.
And that is what I violated,
is that they were expecting a professional relationship.
One that is characterized by a lot of trust and
me suggesting that we go on first name basis, you know,
that really rubbed them the wrong way on the relationship dimension.
And they rejected that.
>> Which is interesting culturally,
because being on a first name basis is something, as an American we strive for.
>> Yeah.
>> So, maintaining that distance for me,
it sounds like there's some kind of problem.
>> Yeah, and it's a power distance issue to some degree.
Because in your own culture,
there's less of a contradiction between informal speech and professional respect.
It's not mutually exclusive.
In other contexts, it might be.
Okay, so we have these four dimensions.
Factual statement, appeal, self disclosure, and relationship statement.
And we know that the last two are very important for this idea of face and
the social performance and I want to actually dig a little deeper as the next
step on how we actually manage those two dimensions, right?
The relationship statement and the self disclosure.
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