1.6 Expectations and Realities

Loading...

Do curso por University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

90 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

90 ratings

Curso 1 de 5 em Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building

Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware. It is often these seemingly unimportant aspects that have the greatest effect on the outcomes of group tasks. Your recognition of them enables you to form, join and lead teams more effectively. You also come to appreciate the role of ritual and symbols in the daily operation of teams, as well as in situations of change and crisis. Knowledge of the ideas and information in this class enables you to be a better team player and a more effective team leader.

Na lição

Why Culture Matters in Organizations

In this unit, we will begin by defining the "team" and then proceed to explore what enables teams to function, the role that culture plays in every team, and how "habitus" and "cultural fit" could affect our performance in specific teams.

1.1 Introduction1:33

1.2 What are Teams?5:15

1.3 A Closer Look at Culture4:59

1.4 Culture as Cultivation6:15

1.5 Being Unaware of Culture4:34

1.6 Expectations and Realities3:56

1.7 The Little Cultural Things that Matter6:05

1.8 Culture Shock5:35

1.9 Habitus4:23

1.10 Characteristic Ways of Speaking within the Team5:12

1.11 What We Say Versus What We Do5:19

1.12 Hiring and Cultural Fit4:18

1.13 High Culture5:42

Conheça os instrutores

Greg Urban, Ph.D.
Professor
Anthropology

Two cultural anthropologists, James Bradley and Mark Phillips,

did an interesting study about the difficulties people experience when they

travel across cultural boundaries.

This study was done back in the early 1970's, the researchers wanted to know

how the expectations that people had before they traveled abroad

compared with their experiences to people who'd never left the United Sates.

They were particularly concerned with long term stays of at least a year and

up to several years.

So first they interviewed college students who had never traveled abroad.

Then for their group who had experienced extended stays elsewhere in the world,

they interviewed returning Peace Corps workers,

who had spend a considerable amount of time abroad, usually living with, and

helping out people who are part of the underdeveloped or developing world.

For added insight, they also interviewed Chinese students living and

studying in the United States.

Their method was to first draw up a long list of the kinds of things

that might be different when one travels abroad.

They came up with 33 items in total as a reasonable sample of the kind of

things that differ across cultural boundaries.

I stress that this is only a very small sample

it includes items like the type of food eaten, the type of colors worn,

the amount of privacy I would have and so forth.

For the students who had never traveled abroad, they developed a scale in which

the type of fooding was assigned at arbitrary value of 500.

The students were asked to evaluate each of the other items on the list,

giving a proportionally greater or lesser value to the item based on how difficult

they expected their adjustment to the cultural differences to be.

So, if they thought for example that the amount of privacy they would have would be

twice as difficult for them to adjust to, they would give it a value of 1,000.

If they thought it would be half as difficult,

they would give it a value of 250.

They asked the returning peace corps workers and

Chinese students to do the same assessment, but

in their case based on how much adjustment each of the items had actually required.

They then ranked the items in terms of difficulty adjustment from 1 to 33.

This is what they found on the chart you see on the screen.

In some cases, the expectations corresponded to the reality experienced by

the Peace Corps workers.

In others, however, there were major discrepancies.

I want to call your attention to just a couple of these discrepancies that

are especially revealing about culture.

The general pace of life and how punctual most people are.

The individuals who had not traveled abroad had ranked these very low on

the list, 30th and 32nd respectively out of 33.

So right near the very bottom.

For the returning peace corp veterans however,

these are two of the most difficult things to adjust to.

They rank them as you can see respectively second, and third, and

I want to stress again, what we’re talking about here.

The general pace of life and how punctual most people are.

Why would these be so difficult for Americans to adjust to?

What this reasearch is telling us is that it is very often the little

cultural differences that are the most difficult to adjust to.

I'll go into this further in our next video.

Because in the business world such little matters can often have a big impact

on how successful teams are.

And accomplishing their goals.

Explore nosso catálogo

Registre-se gratuitamente e obtenha recomendações, atualizações e ofertas personalizadas.

O Coursera proporciona acesso universal à melhor educação do mundo fazendo parcerias com as melhores universidades e organizações para oferecer cursos on-line.

© 2018 Coursera Inc. Todos os direitos reservados.

Baixar na App Store

Baixar no Google Play