Consider how people conduct meetings face-to-face in different societies. You’ll notice that meetings do not start the same way as we move from culture to culture. Some are opened punctually, briskly, and in a business-like fashion. Others start with chitchat, and some meetings have difficulty getting going at all. Much of this has to do with differences in communication. Generally, cultures can be divided into three categories with regard to how they communicate: linear-active, multi-active, and reactive.
Linear-active people tend to be task-oriented, highly organized planners who complete action chains by doing one thing at a time, preferably in accordance with a linear agenda. Speech is for information and depends largely on facts and figures. Broadly speaking, Germans, Americans, British, Australians, Canadians, and Northern Europeans — including Scandinavians — belong to this category.
Multi-active people are loquacious, emotional, and impulsive, and attach great importance to family, meetings, relationships, compassion, and human warmth. They like to do many things at the same time and are poor followers of agendas. Speech is for opinions. Italians, French, Spaniards, and Latin Americans belong to this category, as well as Arabs, Africans, and Southern Slavs. Reactive people are good listeners. Rarely do they initiate action or discussion, preferring first to establish the other’s positions, then react to it, and formulate their own opinions. Reactives listen before they leap. Speech is for creating harmony. Chinese, Japanese, and nearly all Asians belong to this category; in Europe, Finnish and Swedish citizens display some reactive characteristics.
Creating a successful meeting where different cultural communication types are present can be a challenge, needless to say. At any meeting of an international team, the meeting leader has the task of establishing a procedural and communicative style that will be acceptable to, even welcomed by, the participants.
Concepts of time, space, and protocol also play their part. Cross-cultural factors will continue to influence international negotiation, and there is no general panacea of strategies to ensure quick understanding. The only possible solutions lie in a close analysis of the likely problems. These will vary in the case of each negotiation, so the combination of strategies required to facilitate the discussions will be specific for each occasion.
Richard D. Lewis is the founder of Richard Lewis Communications, headquartered in the U.K. and dedicated to helping organizations communicate across different cultures. He also authored the bestselling book When Cultures Collide, and lectures frequently on cross-cultural issues.