An interesting comparison between Chinese and American ways of thinking. The Chinese will adopt a holistic view looking at how someone interacts with their environment, whilst the Americans will focus more on the specific aspects of the person. It compares the work of psychologists Richard E. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda to explain this cultural difference.
Although the article is focussed on international business relations between the two cultures, it highlight how easy it is for confusion to arise when people approach scenarios from different angles.
For most people, paid work is unsettling and energy-sapping. Despite employee engagement racing up the priority list of CEOs (see, for example, The Conference Board’s CEO Challenge 2014), our research into workplaces all over the world reveals a sorry state of affairs: workers who are actively disengaged outnumber their engaged colleagues by an overwhelming factor of 2:1. The good news is that there are companies out there bucking the trend, and we’ve discovered how.
Over a five-year timeframe, we studied 32 exemplary companies (collectively employing 600,000 people) across seven industries including hospitality, banking, manufacturing, and hospitals. At these companies, the engaged workers outnumber the actively disengaged ones by a 9:1 ratio. To understand what drives that tremendous advantage, we looked for contrasts between them and a much larger set of companies we know to be struggling to turn around bland and uninspiring workplaces.
We found seven elements in place at the companies with spirited employees which are notably lacking in the others. Are all of the seven causes of high performance? No doubt at least some of them involve virtuous circles. But as a recipe for an engaged workforce, these are ingredients we feel confident in recommending…
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