Cultural differences between Germany and France PDF

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Eine Seminararbeit über Kulturen in verschiedenen Ländern. Kulturunterschiede zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland werden beleuchtet. Unter anderem Kommunikation, Verhaltensmuster, Denkweisen und Gruppenzusammenhalt....

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20 Expatriate assignment in France: Cultural differences and methods to support the acculturation process

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Table of contents 1. Introduction.............................................................................................................................2 2. Pre- trip preparation................................................................................................................2 2.1 What is culture?.................................................................................................................2 2.2 Prejudices towards the French...........................................................................................3 2.3 Basic data on France.........................................................................................................3 2.4 Culture shock.....................................................................................................................3 3. The French culture compared to the German..........................................................................5 3.1 Apparent manners and conceptions...................................................................................5 3.1.1 Greeting habits............................................................................................................5 3.1.2 Time focus..................................................................................................................6 3.2 Social gender roles............................................................................................................7 3.3 Social networks.................................................................................................................9 3.4 Communication.................................................................................................................9 3.4.1 Explicit and implicit communication.......................................................................10 3.4.2 Language..................................................................................................................10 3.5 Hierarchy.........................................................................................................................11 3.6 Family life.......................................................................................................................12 3.6.1 Education..................................................................................................................12 3.6.2 Eating habits.............................................................................................................13 4. Methods to support my acculturation process...................................................................14 5. Conclusion............................................................................................................................15 6. Bibliography........................................................................................................................15

1. Introduction “Economic globalization means the reduction and removal of barriers between national borders in order to facilitate the flow of goods, capital, services and labor (UNITED NATIONS 2002, S.2).” Due to this phenomenon a purely domestic focus is no longer viable for firms in most industries (Cavusgil, Knight, Riesenberger, Rammal and Freeman 2012). The company where I am employed is one of them; I work for “XYZ-GmbH” which is a company with its headquarters in Goldscheuer in the south of Germany near the French border. We produce high quality meat processing devices and ice machines and sell them to customers from all over the world. Currently there are two independent subsidiaries one situated in the USA and the other in France. By reason of has continuing problems with the employees of our French subsidiary, our company decided to send me as an international business student to work together with the employees of the subsidiary in France. The main problems are misunderstandings, communicational lack of understanding and differences in the perception of good working processes. I wonder about the reason for this problem, because the two countries are direct neighbors and I don’t expect big differences between the people of both countries. The main topic is my expatriate assignment in our subsidiary in France. To be prepared, I gather basic information about culture and impacts of it; I also do some basic research about the country before I travel to France. During my trip I scrutinize the industrial location France and search for differences to my own country to be able to elaborate methods to support the acculturation process within the work and private environment. When I am back in Germany I summarize my findings and experiences.

2. Pre- trip preparation According to Keup (2010) it is important to inform yourself about the culture and the country itself before you go to a foreign country because people are not the same all over the world and they have different cultural characteristics. Keup points out that if you are aware of the cultural circumstances in the particular country you know how to react appropriately when interacting with international partners and how to avoid awkward mistakes.

2.1 What is culture? Keup (2010) describes Culture as the collective programming of the subconscious mind; she says that it is not hereditary but learned. When a child grows it learns different behavior

patterns, values, mindsets and rituals, all this in combination gives identity to individuals and makes them feel belonging to a specific group of people. Insiders from one culture are also able to see directly who belongs to the same group too and who doesn’t. Culture provides stability, orientation and therewith security, due to this fact we often perceive people from other cultures, with other behavior, values and rituals as worrying or even threatening. Sometimes the antipathy towards other cultures already starts before we come in contact with them; reasons are prejudices which are often anchored in our mind.

2.2 Prejudices towards the French In their book “Understanding cross-cultural management” Browaeys und Price (2015, S.361) point out that the French have to face a lot of different stereotypes. “The Germans consider the French as showy, the Americans see them as chauvinistic, the Spanish as hypocritical, and the Dutch view them as the embodiment of arrogance.” The French categorize themselves as individualistic.

2.3 Basic data on France In order not to deal only with stereotypes, I did some research to find some concrete information about France in general. The French Republic is a direct neighbor to Germany; both are reciprocal their most important trade partner in Europe (Auswärtiges Amt 2017). The German and French cultural exchange is in the range of music, theatre, art, literature and film very tight and multifaceted, mainly Berlin and Paris are meeting points for French and German people who are engaged in the cultural sector.

2.4 Culture shock Many people who went to foreign countries and came in contact with different cultures for longer periods report on the culture shock they experienced as really unpleasant. I was never able to imagine how that culture shock feels like but I think it can’t be bad if I know something about this phenomenon in advance. To be prepared I did some research about this issue.

According to Pedersen (1995 p.14) “culture shock is a profoundly personal experience” and it affects people in different ways if it occurs. Some people are not even aware of going through a culture shock, they just notice the cultural differences and sometimes the similarities as well. It is a process which happens inside each individual who has to face unexpected circumstances and unfamiliar events. Pederson has structured the culture shock into five stages.

Figure 1: The five stages of the cultural shock (Pedersen 1995)

The first stage is the “honeymoon stage”, here the newly arrived person sees the new culture like a tourist and curiosity and excitement predominate. The basic identity of the person is still rooted in the back-home setting. At the next stage; the “disintegration” the new culture’s requirements overwhelm the person, now there is disintegration of old familiar cues which leads to the experiencing of self-blame and the feeling of personal inadequacy.” “Reintegration” is the next stage; here the individual learns how to function in the new culture because he learns how to reintegrate cues of the new culture. In this stage the person often

feels anger and resentment towards the new culture as having caused difficulties and being less adequate than the old familiar ways. If people are in this stage, it is difficult to help them because their anger is outer-directed. After this difficult stage the fourth stage, which is called “autonomy”, occurs, here the expatriate learns to see the good and bad elements in the old and new culture, a balanced perspective appears and now there is a higher ability to interpret the home and the host culture. The last stage is called “reciprocal interdependence”, now the individual has reached a high level of biculturalism and has become almost comfortable in both cultures. After this research I think it is not possible to avoid the first uncomfortable stages of the culture shock but with my newly gained knowledge I am aware of this phenomenon and can classify the emotions if I feel at the wrong place or just lost. I will do my best to accelerate the process of culture shock in order to minimize the negative impacts of it.

3. The French culture compared to the German Finally I start my travel to our subsidiary in France, now I will live for 8 months with a host family there, which consists of the parents Colette and Jean, the 12 years old daughter Lily and the 8 years old son Louis. We contacted each other with the help of a platform on the internet. I choose this way of accommodation because I wanted to experience the foreign culture as intensive as possible; my aim was not only to do research about the culture in the working environment I also wanted to learn something about the culture in the private environment. As I arrived at the house of my host family in France, the whole family was waiting to welcome me.

3.1 Apparent manners and conceptions 3.1.1 Greeting habits

As I shook the hands of every single member of the family I realized how loose and weak their handshake was. After some research in a handbook for French-German relationships from Breuer and Bartha (2012) I found out that the French and Germans shake hands in a different way, in Germany we want to send the signal that the counterpart can trust us, therefore we have a straight, direct look in the others’ eyes and handshaking is powerful and tight. If the counterpart is reacting to the handshake in a different manner for example with too little power or too short eye contact,

the Germans are irritated or even distrustful. A German manager once said “When I shake hands with a French person it feels like I hold a dead fish in my hand (Breuer and Bartha 2012, S.62).” In France it is just the other way around; the handshake is loose and the eye contact is shorter. Too tight handshaking seems rude according to French people and thereby eye contact of long duration they record as a threat, due to this the French often call the Germans “barbaric.” Already this small difference between the ways of greeting can slow down the process of building up a good relationship to each other, when we perceive distrust or anxiety we block against the other and subconsciously we concentrate on searching for other possible danger signals. Once I found out that the French greet each other like this I do it this way too to adapt to them that will help to prevent misunderstandings and distrust. 3.1.2 Time focus

When I came into the office of the subsidiary the first time the employees stopped working and celebrated my arrival, they had a lot of questions for me and we did a lot of small talk. Everybody was involved in good conversation and nobody seemed to care about the time or their tasks. In Germany something like this small celebration wouldn’t be possible because everyone has a strict schedule where the tasks are fixed. I found out that this issue was investigated by Hall (1989), he found out that cultures have different positions to time, in his explanation he splits the monochronic and polychronic cultures and explains the different meanings of time to this cultures. In monochronic countries like Germany “time is experienced and used in a linear way,” the people like to do one activity at a time and they don’t like it to move away from the schedule. Their main focus of the Germans lies rather on the information than on the people and that is why the relations with others may suffer because they don’t fit into the schedule of things to be done. In countries like France which are rather polychronic, the people focus on several tasks at one time and they are less dependent on detailed information when doing tasks. Schedules are rather approximately and can be changed at any time because the involvement of people is more important than the schedules; this attitude often leads to problems with punctuality when working in groups with co-workers from different countries and cultures. The next weeks I noticed the phenomenon of this different understanding of time in meetings as the participants were interrupted by phone calls and the other people waited for him finishing the call; in Germany you normally switch off your phone when attending to meetings because interruptions are disrespectful.

To support my acculturation in France I try to keep calm even when I am annoyed at the easygoing time conception of the French.

3.2 Social gender roles One day I went to the office and there was again one of these small gatherings in the kitchen, this time it was the celebration to honor the employee of the month. Later I talked to Luc who was the elected person but he was not that exited as I would be if I was honored like this. He didn’t even really care about this award. To explain this issue, it is appropriate to use the dimension “masculinity” from Hofstede (2011), he conducted one of the broadest studies of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture and introduced the 6 dimensions of culture by which one can compare the cultural characteristics of different countries; they are expressed by indices on a scale from around 0 to 100.

Hofstededes 6 dimensions France and Germany 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

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Figure 2: The five dimensions of national culture by Hofstede The dimension masculinity by Hofstede (2012) gives information about emotional patterns of a society; eighter the nation is rather masculine or rather feminine. In one of his videos Hofstede points out that we must not mix the terms up with male or female, the masculinity of

a society states how “manlike” or “womanlike” the people think. The people in masculine societies think “manlike”, what means that competition, achievement and success are more important than relationships. In feminine nations the people think more “womanlike”, here cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life is of importance. Gelbrich and Müller (2011 p.844) state that we can also see masculinity and femininity as the “ranges of societies in which social gender roles are clearly distinct to societies in which social gender roles overlap.” The fundamental issue Hofstede (2012) defines here is what motivates people, wanting to be the best like it is in masculine or liking what you do like in feminine societies. In the business context Masculinity versus Femininity is sometimes also related to as "tough versus tender" cultures. On his website Hofstede (2017) explains that the Masculinity is measured by Masculinity vs. Femininity Index (MAS) where 0 stands for feminine and 100 masculine ways of thinking. (2017) With a score of 43, France has a somewhat feminine culture what explains why Luc was not that excited about his award, for the French competition doesn’t stand in the first place. With 66 point Germany is considered a masculine society. Hofstede (2012) supports the result that France is a feminine culture with the fact that they have a really generous welfare system, “the 35-hour week and five weeks of holidays per year.” An article in “Handesblatt” Hanke (2015) explains that in France it is easier to get unemployment compensation and the total amount of the payment is much higher than in Germany. Hanke (2016) also gives information on the French week with 35 hours of regular working time which is fixed by the government, the maximum time of working per week is 48 hours and the hours of overtime can be collected used for holidays. The facts named above indicate a society where the focus is on the well-being of the people rather than on the individual person. The French people set their focus on quality of life, they “work in order to live” as Hofstede (2012) points out. In opposition Germany is a rather masculine society, they got a 40-hour week and still only 24 days of statutory holidays per year. For the Germans property and money are very important, they “live in order to work” as Hofstede expresses this. The German society is driven by success and success is defined by being the winner.

With the help of this theory now I understand why the honor of being the employee of the month was not of importance for Luc, his focus doesn’t lie on winning something; being happy with the things he does is much more important. Now as I know this theory I understand that there are other things which can be explained with it; for example the dining culture. For a successful integration in this sector of culture I try to take off my “Germanness” and relax a little bit, I won’t put too much pressure on work. Furthermore I try to enjoy the little things in life the same way as the French do.

3.3 Social networks One day on my way to work when I was crossing the street at a crosswalk, I got really frightened as I realized that nobody was stopping for me as a pedestrian, they acted as if there was no crosswalk. Later as I talked to my co-workers on my experience I found out that this behaviour is nothing special in France. By explanation of Breuer und Bartha (2012) the Germans are so-called collaborative egoists and the French are individualistic egoists, they differ in their way of facing the community. The expression “egoist” is no negative term in this theory, it is seen as a natural characteristic of all people who have the aim to live, grow and develop. The German collaborative egoists view themselves as individuals belonging to a higher ranked community; they have a distinctive sense of justice what leads to the consequence that they respect laws like traffic regulations. If another member of the community breaks rules the other people start to criticise or even denounce the troublemaker. Collaborative egoists strive after appreciation, the public opinion is very important for them. In contrast the main characteristic of the French individualistic egoists is that they’ve got a loose connection to the community in the country, their own and their family’s well-being is most important. There is a strong solidarity within families of individualistic egoists; towards strangers first they are really careful or even sceptical. The public opinion is not important for individualistic egoists; they like to form their own opinion about the issue. The French tend to foreground their own gain referring respecting rules, if breaking rules brings an advantage it is considered to be okay. To pick up the practical example with the traffic, in France it is common to disrespect tra...