MODULE 6 PAPER 1

Module 6 Paper

OGL 350

October 1, 2019

Kristen Neuhausel

Arizona State University

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Reflection

There were a lot of take aways from this week’s readings. A major part of my learnings

was about understanding the way people speak and work through conflict. It is really important

to understand the way other cultures work, but even more important to understand the way they

work through conflict. It makes perfect sense conflicts amongst different cultures can go

unresolved due to the way in which it is handled.

Having high cultural intelligence is the first step, in my opinion, to dealing with conflict

management. Companies and different organizations are now, more than ever, exposed to

unfamiliar cultural context and culturally diverse workforces. This can be a challenge for

companies and cause a great deal of tension and conflict (Gonçalves, G., Reis, M., Sousa, C.,

Santos, J., Orgambídez-Ramos, A., & Scott, P., 2016). A lot of my work every day is dealing

with conflict and mediating tension between employees. Having a high cultural intelligence will

not only help me succeed in working and communicating with other cultures but will also help

me when I am dealing with the conflict in my store. It is very easy to stay in the avoiding style

of conflict management. In this style we find that the individual has low concern for self and

low concern for others. What I strive to be is the integrating style of conflict management. I

think that it is really important to have a high concern for yourself as well as for others.

I really enjoyed reading the different communication styles from the business insider

article. It was so interesting to read and follow the diagrams that represented the way different

cultures work through issues in the way of communication. In this article, they say that

understanding the basic traits of other cultures, as well as your own, will help reduce the

unpleasant surprises and culture shock, give us insight and allows us to interact successfully

with nationalities with which we may have previously had difficulty. It is interesting to think
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about our own culture as it compares to others. In America, we tend to get upset when there is a

disagreement and prefer to resolve it as quickly as possible. However, when communicating

with the French, you should expect to have a long, vigorous and logical debate (Lubin, 2014). I

think these diagrams will be incredibly useful for me as I manage cultural conflict within my

store. It is imperative to cultural awareness and will save quite a bit of headaches.

When I first became a store manager, I hired a refugee from Puerto Rico. He was great

with customers and had an amazing work ethic. The rest of my team was most white people

from this predominately white town. I honestly never even thought about the diversity

management that I would have to do as well as cultural conflict. One day, one of my woman

team members came to me and said she felt uncomfortable because Jake was telling them that

they looked beautiful and was taking a long time to get people through our drive through line.

When I talked to Jake about this situation he seemed completely confused. He never felt like he

was doing anything wrong and felt like he was taking the time he should with the customers in

the drive through. I really tried to deal with the situation rather than figure out and understand

the cultural differences and how we could integrate different cultures into our team. When I

look back on this situation, I think a lot of the issues we ran into was a lack of cultural

awareness of everyone on the team. I definitely used the avoidance or compromising style of

conflict management. At the time, I really didn’t think about how the culture of both parties

influenced the situation.

The Elephant and the Giraffe

The wonderful thing about the story of the Elephant and the Giraffe was the emotional

connection that the story makes you feel as you’re reading it. It creates empathy which is

exactly what we are striving to create when we deal with other cultures. When I think about
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how to relate it to diversity management, I think about the idea of different perspectives from

different cultures. The elephant saw the situation completely different from the giraffe. The

giraffe just saw his own view and wanted to fix the elephant. The elephant will never look

different regardless of how he diets (Roosevelt, 1996). This concept makes so much sense to

me. When we try to integrate cultures, we need to understand the perspective of both sides.

Forcing someone to change is not a way to resolve conflict amongst different cultures. It is also

important to note that different perspectives cause tension. Understanding how and where the

conflict and tension begins is a very good way of starting to work towards resolving the conflict

and coming to a resolution.

Personal Diversity Maturity

In the personal diversity maturity, I scored an 82 which was just shy of the 85 to be

considered high diversity maturity. I really felt like I answered the questions well, but I only got

full points on two of them. One of the questions that I scored a ten on was the one regarding a

woman in a high position in a company. I think it was easier for me to pick the right answer for

this question because I am a woman and I am familiar with the struggles of this particular

situation. Most of the other questions, the highest I could score was a 7. I seemed to understand

what the wrong solution was but had difficultly picking the very best ones. The conclusion I

drew from doing this was that I was consistently managing the problems and not creating an

environment that focuses on integration or diversity. I think it is easy to try to over compensate

when you are trying to manage cultural conflict. This just causes more tension and doesn’t

resolve the issues and conflict at hand.

In my opinion, it all comes down to communication style and cultural awareness when

dealing with conflict amongst diverse teams and diversity in general. In companies and in
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organizations today, we are becoming more diverse every day. It is incredibly important that we

are able to work together and understand the value of diverse teams.
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References

Gonçalves, G., Reis, M., Sousa, C., Santos, J., Orgambídez-Ramos, A., & Scott, P. (2016).

Cultural intelligence and conflict management styles. International Journal of

Organizational Analysis, 24(4), 725-742.

Lubin, G. (2014). 25 Fascinating Charts of Negotiation Styles Around The World. Business

Insider- Singapore.

Roosevelt, T.R. (1996). Giraffe and Elephant