Whither the Groupie?

 

Part 3 of a weekly series entitled, The Bamboo Ceiling: Managing Chinese Employees Beyond Stereotype

By William R. Dodson

 

The West has a stereotypical view of Chinese as group-oriented, the individual unable and unwilling to function on his own. However, European countries prefer group orientation even more than do the Chinese in various business contexts.

 

Franz Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner in their book Riding the Waves of Culture (McGraw-Hill, 1998) cited that in the results of several surveys the French are more group-oriented than the Chinese when it comes to issues such as receiving credit for work that a group has done. The Italian group, meanwhile, would accept responsibility more readily for a problem an individual has created more readily than would the Chinese.

 

One has to consider that the Chinese to a large extent have been maverick merchants and sellers for millennia. They’ve taken great pride in their entrepreneurial savvy, their penchant for saving much of what they make, and their perseverance when confronted with difficulties.

 

Group orientation differs between Chinese and Westerners to the extent that Face is of paramount importance to Chinese in their relationships; that is, “the regard in which they are held by others or the light in which they appear …” as Seligman¹ writes. In other words, the individuality Chinese exhibit in commercial ventures is balanced by the requirement to show off the results to other Chinese. The quest for this form of validation – which is extent in every culture to varying degrees – is especially important to the Chinese. Some Chinese have even told me Face in the group is even more important than money itself; ie, that money is often used to gain greater Face.

 

A case that exemplifies the relationship between Face and individual contribution for Chinese involves a Chinese manager at an American bank. The American supervisor of the bank had a difficult relationship with the manager, because the manager never talked to the supervisor about any difficulties in the department. A Chinese employee explained that the manager felt “as long as the manager worked well and worked hard, no one should criticize him; otherwise, don’t bother him.” The manager’s belief was that his supervisor “should trust him. If there’s a big problem, he’ll let him know about it. Otherwise, to inquire would be to show a lack of trust in the manager’s ability.” The employee explained the manager’s Chinese thinking was: “if you want to use me, you have to trust me.” For the supervisor to distrust the manager would be to make the manager lose Face.

 

Western managers preserve the stereotype of the Chinese as a follower, or as a cog in a machine, at their peril. The Chinese are a highly individualistic people with a deep respect for thousands of years of custom and tradition. Many Chinese were managers and leaders in their own right before they began working in Western companies. Language barriers and unfamiliarity with Western cultural norms force Chinese employees to take on subsidiary roles in Western organizations. The segregation creates what I call The Bamboo Ceiling, in which Western managers do their work on a level above and beyond Chinese employees, at a distance, so to say. The separation perpetuates management-by-stereotype, which managers resort to in the absence of relationship based on individual characteristics.

 

A young, petite Chinese management trainee from a premiere MBA program said that on one of her training rotations an American Vice President had said to her, “there was no way he was going to let her manage his guys [sic].” Other women managers abounded throughout the organization. Her references were excellent, her English language ability impeccable. Still, she was left with doing analytical work that was boring and repetitious. The trainee soon left the hide-bound organization after the company had already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in her technical training.

 

When Western managers invest in Chinese staff to encourage individual initiative and in the management teams to broaden their perceptions of the capabilities and goals of Chinese, Western companies will tap into a reservoir of energy and perspective that had hitherto been unknown to Western business.

 

¹Chinese Business Etiquette: A Guide to Protocol, Manners, and Culture in the People’s Republic of China, by Scott Seligman (Warner Books, 1999)

 

William R. Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road Advisors, L.L.C., a management consultancy that develops and positions products and people for success in international markets. He is the contributing editor on international business to the American Management Association’s (AMA) MWorld Journal of Management, and writes the weekly column “The Cultured Business”, found at www.silkrc.com. He is Managing Editor of The China Alert, a publication of The United States-China Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached at sradvisors@gmail.com or +1 (847)722-7817.

 

Read other articles in this series at: The Cultured Business.