Culture

Explanations > Culture

Culture is what happens when people get together. It tells us how to behave and agree. Understanding the culture of a team, organization or country can make a lot of difference when you want to change minds.

Articles on culture:

• What is Culture defines the term.
• Elements of Culture shows things you can change to change the culture.
• Hall's Cultural factors: Time, context and space.
• Hofstede's cultural factors describes a set of factors that appear at national level and the differing priorities that different countries place upon them.
• Trompenaars' and Hampden-Turner's cultural factors are another national-level system for looking at international differences.
• Trompenaars' four cultures model, which plots a 2 x 2 grid of task-people focus vs. centralized-decentralized style.
• Deal and Kennedy's model looks at the level of risk vs. the speed of feedback and reward and again comes up with four cultures.
• The Competing Values Framework: In/out vs. stability/flexibility for another four-culture model.
• Kluckholn and Strodtbeck's Dimensions of Culture: Based on basic beliefs and values.
• Creating a Positive Culture: ways to make culture organizationally helpful.
• Four American Fears: that are embedded in US culture.

So what?

So take time to understand the culture of the person or people you are working with. Find how they and their peers share a world-view. Find their shared values, mental models etc. Doing this will significantly reduce the time you need to understand every person from the ground up.

If you can adopt their cultural approaches, you will appear to come from a similar culture and will more easily be accepted.

Cultures also have blind spots where they are vulnerable and hot spots where you should fear to tread.

See also

Theories about belief, Theories about groups, Preferences, Social distances, Values