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1、Russian cultural values and workplace communication stylesMira BergelsonMoscow State Universitymbergelsonmail.ruAbstractRussian basic cultural values are looked at from the point of view of interactional patterns which determine specific features of cross-cultural communication in todays Russia. Suc
2、h basic values as emotionality not-having-control, irrationality, and judgemental attitudes towards world and other people may but often have significant influence on the success or failure of intercultural workplace communication, effectiveness of management style, and the outcome of business negot
3、iations.This paper looks at the cases when Russian basic cultural values show up through linguistic choices shaping language production in the workplace, which are consequently misattributed by Western partners. No matter what the language of intercultural communication is - Russian, or English, or
4、German - the meaning of many language expressions may be reconstructed wrongly by the representative of another culture. One of the main reasons for these pragmatic errors is The Politeness Principle applied differently as compared to ones native culture. Yet another - subdivisions within the Russia
5、n culture into three main subtypes: T(traditional), S (soviet), and W(westernized).1. Cultural sensitivity and cultural knowledge.Effective communication in organizations is one of the important instruments for creating sustainable competitive advantage of the organization within a dynamic environme
6、nt of modern corporate world . Organizational communication is hard enough without being intercultural. And on top of it people have to deal with cultural differences (Persikova 2002). Problems of cross-cultural communication tend to become crucial for the process of ongoing globalization of the wor
7、ld because they create obstacles to successful business and professional communication. One of the most effective ways to deal with cross-cultural misunderstanding is training for cross-cultural sensitivity. Besides training in general intercultural sensitivity that expatriate top managers from big
8、corporations may be exposed at the organizations headquarters, there is a lot of culture-specific knowledge they have to acquire before they are ready for the overseas assignments. This information is hard to teach for a number of reasons. The main reason is a huge amount and diversity of cultural k
9、nowledge. It is hard to say what and to what extent has to be acquired so that a person may function constructively in a given culture. Learning certain specific traditions may seem useless, or better to say - of ethnographic, not practical value. On the other hand, - one never knows - it might prov
10、e to be very useful to understand such a specific cultural trait as, for instance, why characters in Russian films always seem to be quarrelling (while, in fact, they are not). Just observing this as a behavioral feature will only produce some unpleasant feelings one reason why usually the Soviet/Ru
11、ssian films never enjoyed financial success in the US. But spending some effort on analyzing what this behavioral feature may denote and how it is related to other facts of Russian culture may help to avoid negative reaction and even, at some point may prove very helpful for understanding problems o
12、f the group dynamics in an office or a project team.I suggest to treat most of the seemingly unrelated and isolated pieces of cultural information in a more systematic way as surface representations of certain basic cultural values, so that it will enable us to draw correct cultural inferences out o
13、f these knowledge. In the example above we have a surface (behavioral) representation - loud and intense pronunciation. It is defined as such (too loud, too intense) on the basis of the impressions of an outsider, and is evaluated (in many cases - negatively) as a result of unconscious comparison to
14、 the similar (or - considered similar) communicative situations in the outsiders own culture (people speak loudly and intensely when they quarrel). Basic cultural values (in the example above - emotionality and directness) is the knowledge to be learned. It can be structured and organized in a compa
15、ct way. In that case, cultural inferences (in the example above - the problems that may arise for the group dynamics) would be those traits of (communicative) behavior that an outsider first consciously observed as surface representations, then attributed to a known basic value in order to use this
16、knowledge for managing cultural differences effectively, without emotional evaluation. Within such an approach the most important information to be learned is basic cultural values, and the most important skills are intercultural sensitivity and ability for logical reasoning. Therefore, culturally mindful communication will consist in making cultural inferences only after surface representations have been al
