1.8 Culture Shock

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

148 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

The Power of Team Culture

148 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

In the previous video, we introduced the concept of culture shock.

In this video, we will take a closer look at it.

You can probably already appreciate that even the mild form of culture shock,

experienced by the sales people who moved from one company to the next,

is disruptive to team performance.

Obviously, it affected global firms' sells team,

since the team had to go out and recruit new members.

But the concept was originally developed during an earlier era of anthropology,

when researchers like me would go away for

prolonged periods with very little contact with their home countries.

For example, when I went to Brazil in the 1970s for

a prolonged stint of field research, about 2 and a half years,

I had no phone contact with the United States and only intermittent mail contact.

Probably half the letters would get lost.

That situation is obviously different from the present day, when we have phone and

Internet communication almost everywhere.

But understanding the more extreme forms of culture shock can better help us to

comprehend the little shocks that disrupt many teams of all sizes.

Here is one definition of the traditional version of culture shock.

Initially, the sojourners report elation and optimism associated with

positive expectations regarding interaction with their hosts.

As they actually become involved in the role relationships and

encounter frustrations in trying to achieve certain goals

when the proper means are unclear or unacceptable, they become confused and

depressed and express negative attitudes regarding the host country.

Obviously, serious depression of this sort

leads to an individual's inability to function normally.

And so undermines the individual's ability to contribute

to the successful fulfillment of the team's assigned collective tasks.

What I want to stress here is the relationship between culture and feelings,

or emotions.

As we'll see in unit three of this course,

team cultures regularly develop mechanisms for calling up

positive feelings that motivate individual members to contribute to group efforts.

These mechanisms crucially involve rituals and symbols.

We'll be looking at the roll of rituals and symbols in teams of different sorts.

Culture shock is related to what anthropologist Anthony F C Wallace

referred to as mazeway disintegration.

Wallace was actually my predecessor here at Penn many years

ago as Chair of the Anthropology Department.

In any case you can think of a mazeway as a kind of a mental map for life.

The analogy here is to the actual mazeways used by

psychologists in their experiments with rats.

Wallace felt that each of us had such a mazeway in our head.

Wallace's idea was that the mazeway includes the goals we're trying to

achieve, as well as the plans and processes and techniques for

achieving those goals.

If you think back about our earlier definition of culture,

you'll remember that includes goals and values.

In so far as we acquire those goals and

values through social learning from others.

It also includes ways of behaving and speaking.

These are the analogues to the plans, processes, and

techniques in Wallace's mazeways.

Wallace was interested in extreme cases of mazeway disintegration, as for

example after natural disasters, but also dramatic cross-cultural encounters.

Many Native Americans, for example,

experienced mazeway disintegration when Europeans colonized the new world.

They experienced new and strange ways of life.

New preconceived routines.

Different ways of reasoning about the world.

Situations like the one experienced by the recently hired Global Farm

sales personnel are small scale examples of this kind of disintegration.

I myself never experienced this kind of deep culture shock that causes significant

depression.

However, I do recall my sense of shock as I became more deeply involved in Brazilian

culture.

I remember that many of my middle class Brazilian friends, when they were driving

on city streets, would see a pedestrian crossing in front of them.

And for me, shockingly, say in an aggressive tone of voice,

that guy wants to die, as they accelerated towards the pedestrian.

I experienced the game myself many times as a pedestrian.

And it invariably angered and upset me, as well as being frightening.

In particularly memorable incident, I was in Rio crossing the Avenida Beira Mar,

which has several lanes going in one direction.

There was only one car on the road at the time, fairly far away and

in the lane closest to me.

I knew that I would be well across the road before the car arrived.

But I did not figure that the car would actually accelerate sharply,

zoom across the three lanes, and aim straight at me.

As I jumped out of the way, I heard him yelling at me and

gesticulating out the window.

I felt enraged, simultaneously occurred to me, hey, wait, you're an anthropologist.

You're experiencing culture shock, because this is not the way people drive

where you grew up, or at least they didn't have that particular game.

That realization help me to cope with my cultural shock.

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