A Thai company wants to expand by putting a material sourcing office in Italy. The Thai CEO, Chow, sets up such an office, with three Thai nationals and one Italian assistant. The sourcing office allows the Thai company to be close to high quality raw materials and design aesthetic, critical to the manufacture of the high end ceramic wear market. The Thai company wants to enter in the United States. The Italian assistant is in her 20s and female. The Thai team consists of a manager, male 38 years old, procurement staff, female 28 years old, and design staff, male 50 years old. The manager asks the assistant to arrange a one hour open house, to invite key partners in Italy to come to and socialize. The manager calls together the whole team and gives a directive to the team, to put together invitation materials that were brought from Thailand, that have specific Thai imagery and design. The assistant interrupts him politely, and says that the idea is not a good one. And also, it does not appeal to the local pride in the art and craft of the country. She feels strongly that this is the case, and makes her point strongly in front of all the staff. The manager is taken aback by the open disagreement, and repeats his request. The assistant interrupts him again and says that they should send Italian simply designed invitations, and make personal visits to the most important of the tradespeople. >> Thank you for taking the time to review the situation. If you answered any one of the answers, you're right. However, you could have done a little better. Actually all four of the answers are correct in totality. The first answer being, gender and role hierarchy played a role in the conflict. The choice of materials played a role in the conflict. The age gap played a role in the conflict. And finally the high and low context cultures played a role. So once again, all four were correct. Now, let's go to a little more descriptive. There is conflict at all levels in this example. Number one, we have a cultural conflict, in the form of the choice of materials. The Thai leader of the office wanted to use materials from his own country, in a statement of pride. However, in this case, the Italian country, the Italian tradespeople were focused and would be focused on delivering materials to the United States. So the choice of using Thai material for the invitations, would have been a cultural barrier to getting what he wanted out of the local country trades people. In addition, there would have been conflict between the Italian assistant, and the Thai leader. The Italian assistant would certainly perceive that the tradespeople would need to see something, either Italian or American, in order to want to come to the office and be really prepared to contribute to the office event. Therefore the Italian assistant would have been correct in coaching the Thai leader to work with the Italian material. There's also the concept, in this example, that there's gender and role hierarchy issues. In Thai culture, it is more than likely that a male leader would want more deference than the Italian assistant, who from a European culture will be very comfortable sharing her opinion very openly. There would be conflict between the Thai leader's perception of what that aggressive communication would mean. The Italian assistant would perceive that she'd normally interact with her colleagues. The Thai leader has the possibility of perceiving that that was insolence. So we have a possible gender conflict, in how the communication occurred. We also have a hierarchy question [COUGH]. In the Asian culture it is typical, not always true but typical, that the leader is afforded some amount of deference. And that would mean that assistants would not voice their opinion publicly and directly, but would do it in some other way. Sometimes privately. There's also the question of age. A younger assistant in cultures that value equanimity, would not at all be hesitant to share his or her opinion. In this case a Thai leader, who's older, may expect some respect and someone to follow along a little more gracefully. And therefore in this case did not get that particular deference and would be upset. And so in that conflict, that possible conflict the Italian assistant would do well to understand that possibility when communicating. Finally option four, there are questions of high and low context cultures. In the Asian culture it tends to be a high context culture, therefore you wouldn't address things so directly in words. You would more so make indirect illusions to your opinion, and hope that the person listening, the listener would have the responsibility to pick up that nuance and react to it. In a European culture there is more tendency to be direct. And so the Italian assistant, from her point of view would have been very comfortable delivering her message, really without any filter. There is also a question of physical location, which is outside of the responses. But if we consider a physical location, if we're a Thai company, having an Italian office, it would be up to the Thai leader to really understand that there are Italian tradespeople, and the Thai leader would want them to focus on delivering a product to the United States. So, the Thai leader would want every opportunity for the Italian tradespeople to really focus on United States, and not be distracted by the Thai culture, either through communication or the materials that were delivered to them, in this case the invitations, to bring them to the office. So if we now change our perspective in reviewing this situation, we would see from the Thai leaders perspective, he could have taken more time to understand the culture within which he was operating. Would have understood gender and role in that culture. And in having the meeting would have expected when everyone was in the room, and he was creating a conversation around how we would approach this invitation. He would already have understood the possibility of the communication style he would have received, from a gender, context and age perspective. From the Italian assistant's perspective, in choosing to work at a company that had Thai nationals working at it, she could have chosen to also understand those same concepts prior to entering into a business conversation. Ultimately, in this case, there is only one particular business issue. The business issue that arose was the question using Thai or more local materials to create the invitation. The rest of the conflict that could have been created, was literally cultural. And in this case, you got a chance to really fully immerse yourself in various levels of cultural conflict, based on the expectations everyone had entering the situation. Hope you had fun reviewing this situation, and we'll go on to the next now. [SOUND]
