1.5 Being Unaware of Culture

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

117 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

117 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the 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.

From the lesson

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

Meet the Instructors

Greg Urban, Ph.D.
Professor
Anthropology

Now here is where it starts to get really interesting.

A lot and maybe by far the greatest proportion

of culture we acquire from others were not even aware of.

It's like the air we breathe.

It's all around us.

If the air is the way it always is we don't notice it.

But we notice it if something is wrong.

For example, if it doesn't smell right.

[SOUND] And the same thing is true of culture.

If something does not conform to the expectations we have,

it can make us uncomfortable.

One of these normally unconscious aspects of culture

has half far away we stand from other people.

The anthropologist, Edward T Hall, developed the study of spatial distances

which has become known to us today as proxemics.

Proxemics is the study of the amount of space people feel,

feel it necessary to keep between themselves, let me emphasize that,

feel it necessary to keep between themselves and other people.

Based on observations of middle class Americans from the Northeastern US Back in

the early 1960s, Hall described four different zones of

proximity between people depending on the type of relationship between them.

First is the intimate zone which is generally between zero and 18 inches.

As Hall refers to it, this is the space of quote lovemaking and wrestling.

Comforting and protecting.

The second zone is the personal zone.

And this tends to range for

this northeastern Americans from 18 inches to about four feet.

Hall refers to it as the protective bubble that people keep around themselves.

And it's inside this bubble that they normally feel comfortable.

Third is the social zone.

This is the distance from about four to 12 feet and it's the zone of business

interactions where one individual might say be behind a desk or a service counter.

Lastly at distances greater than 12 feet, is the public zone.

This might be the distance, say, between someone giving a speech and

the audience or between actors and audience during a play.

What is interesting for us as anthropologists is that

these distances vary based on your cultural upbringing.

People from different parts of the world have different expectations

about what distance is appropriate.

Such distances are especially notable in conversations between

people who had just met or who did not know each other well.

Well I can recall vividly my first experience of differences is this regard.

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest of the United States where,

people tended to fell comfortable with more distance between them than less

when they were conversing.

When I was still in high school, I picked up two hitchhikers.

Now, I know you're not supposed to pick up hitchhikers but

then it wasn't as bad a thing as it is now.

They turned out to have been college students from France traveling

across the country.

I was driving and one student was sitting in the front seat and

the other in the back seat on the passenger side.

Each time one of them spoke, he leaned over and got close to my face.

For me way too close to my face.

I was starting to feel claustrophobic.

I can remember pushing back towards the side door.

I noticed such differences many times in myself and others.

Indeed there's a kind of dance that ensues between people

that have different spatial needs.

If one finds the distance too close, he or she tends to back up.

This makes the other feel the distance is too far.

And so he or she moves forward.

And actually literally take a step each way.

And this causes the first one to move back and so forth.

So that one is actually capable of walking the other around the room.

Maybe we should call it waltzing the other around the room.

Cooperation on teams involves expectations of this sort.

And when the expectation are violated, the performance of the team can suffer.

In the next video we'll talk a little bit more about the relationship between

expectations and realities.

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