The discussions I had recently with NBS about a PhD didn’t lead anywhere, but they did get me interested in the concept of Cultural Intelligence, a concept that NBS is pushing quite hard. I should say, it was a sore point for me that since the Nanyang MBA sold itself as an “Asian MBA”, there was very, very little content that dealt with managing in a multicultural, Asian context. Of course, I learned a great deal about it, but from mixing with a very diverse set of classmates, not because of the courses. Anyway, one of the jobs I’ve applied for is very OB and HR-oriented, and so when I was in Singapore last week I bought Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. I’m still working through it, but it’s being a real eye-opener. Now I have to say: I bought this in the Popular bookshop on NTU campus, so perhaps the OB class at NBS does deal with these issues. I don’t know – I took OB at Tsinghua, which didn’t touch on the differences between national cultures at all (naturally: in China, MBA grads are probably only going to be managing other Chinese, so this isn’t a big issue for them, and the course focused more on other topics). Anyway, just reading the section on Power Distance, and looking at the values for different countries, is really interesting. Of course, we all know that Singapore is hierarchical, but I was suprised to see that the country with the #1 degree of power distance is Malaysia. That explains a lot of the differences I had with a Malay manager when I first came to Singapore… The reason I’m blogging about this now, is that suddenly a few things make a bit more sense. Taking a couple of quotes from the book, in cultures with a high power distance:
- Inequalities among people are expected and desired.
- Less powerful people should be dependent; they are polarized between dependence and counterdependence.
- Hierarchy in organizations reflects existential inequality between highter and lower levels
- Subordinates expect to be told what to do.
- The ideal boss is a benevolent autocrat, or “good father”.
Now, in my job search, I’ve applied to lots of companies in the UK, China, and Singapore. This makes it clearer to me why all of the British companies have responded, and eventually informed me of the outcome, while the Singaporean companies are usually up-front about saying they won’t bother to respond. I doubt that it’s because the Singaporean companies are deluged with applications and the Brits aren’t. As a job-seeker, I’m a supplicant, and so as a high power distance culture, the Singaporeans don’t feel that they have to make any effort. I suspect that it affects other issues as well – I’m sorry to pick on the Singapore Tourism Board again, but I have a feeling that the “we are in charge, so what we do is right” attitude colours Singapore’s methods of marketing itself, and never mind the issues this causes on the ground. (That comment sparked by reading this post on YawningBread). Of course, there are alternative explanations – maybe the woman on the bus and the Hong Kong family simply couldn’t speak English, so had to speak Chinese (but that doesn’t affect the author’s points about using Chinese names that aren’t used by Singaporeans themselves). Also, I disagree that Cantonese is rare in Singapore. Maybe it depends where you live, but in ‘old Singapore’ I hear it a lot. (Granted, I only speak a little bit of Putonghua, but Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese do sound quite different and I can usually differentiate between them).
