This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Culture Map" by Erin Meyer. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How do different cultures approach conflict? Does the culture you come from tend to express disagreement openly or tacitly?
Conflict and disagreement are necessary realities in the business world. But the rules for appropriate disagreement vary across cultures. In discussing conflict and culture, cultural communication expert Erin Meyer divides disagreement styles into two extremes: “confrontational” and “avoids confrontation.”
In this article, we’ll look at why it can be so hard to determine where a culture falls on the disagreement spectrum and present some strategies you can use to ensure that disagreements don’t harm your business relationships.
Open Disagreement
According to Meyer, cultures that disagree openly view disagreement as good for the group. A free exchange of ideas allows for greater innovations, and disagreements are a necessary part of that process. `
So in these cultures, people disagree with you frankly and publicly. It’s not unusual for a strong debate to break out in a meeting.
These open disagreements aren’t viewed as personal attacks—indeed, they have little impact on your personal relationship at all. That’s because in these cultures, the person is independent of the idea. Just because you disagree with somebody vehemently doesn’t mean you disapprove of them overall.
Western and Northern European countries tend to disagree openly.
(Shortform note: In her chapter on trust, Meyer discusses how cultures that value cognitive trust do so partly because they have reliable legal systems they can turn to if something goes wrong. This reasoning may have implications on disagreement styles as well. If damaging your personal relationship doesn’t strongly affect your business dealings anyway, more open disagreement would likely be acceptable. In support of this, many cultures that disagree openly also develop trust cognitively. But not all: For example, the French are very confrontational but lie squarely in the middle of the trusting spectrum.)
How Cultures That Disagree Openly Develop
Meyer suggests that just as the Hegelian method used in the French educational system influenced how they persuade people in business settings, it also influenced how they disagree. In other words, the French disagree openly in business settings because that’s what they were taught to do in school.
(Shortform note: Meyer doesn’t explicitly cite the Hegelian influence on education as a factor in why countries other than France also disagree openly. However, many other countries that practice theoretical thinking (Germany, Italy, and Spain, for example) also disagree confrontationally. This suggests that these countries also disagree openly due to Hegel’s influence on their educational systems. This point is supported by the fact that the Anglo-Saxon countries which practice empirical thinking all lie in the middle of the disagreement spectrum.)
Disagreement-Avoidant Cultures
In some cultures, openly disagreeing with someone will harm your relationship—sometimes seriously and potentially to the point of irreparability.
In these cultures, Meyer states, disagreement is considered to be bad for the group.
Furthermore, in these cultures, disagreeing with someone implies that you disapprove of them as a person. In many disagreement-avoidant cultures, your image is extremely important. If that image is disrupted in any way, it’s considered very embarrassing. To disagree publicly with someone in these cultures is to suggest that this person is trying to project a false image of themselves to the world. As such, openly disagreeing with someone amounts to a personal attack.
(Shortform note: People of all cultures value their image, but how an image disruption affects you personally varies based on what culture you’re in, according to Meyer. Meyer neglects to attribute this idea to Stella Ting-Toomey, who developed face-negotiation theory in 1985. Ting-Toomey was the first to propose that all cultures care about their ‘face,’ or image, but use different behaviors to protect or attack it.)
This doesn’t not mean that disagreement never occurs in these cultures. But if people express disagreement, they do so subtly and privately.
Asian countries tend to be disagreement-avoidant.
How Disagreement-Avoidant Cultures Develop
Meyer sees Confucius’s ideals about group harmony as a major influence on disagreement-avoidant Asian countries.
In Confucianism, there are five fundamental relationships that form the foundation of societal order. Each relationship comes with guidelines about how you need to behave towards each other, and not behaving the way you’re supposed to leads to the breakdown of society. So to disagree openly with someone is to suggest they’re not being true to their prescribed role—and this carries a far greater taboo in Asian cultures due to the Confucian influence.
Factors That Complicate Determining How a Culture Disagrees: Disagreement vs Emotional Displays
In discussing conflict and culture, Meyer also explains the factors that complicate determining how a culture disagrees.
You might assume that cultures that disagree openly are equally open with their emotions, and disagreement-avoidant cultures are emotionally reserved. This tends to be the case, according to Meyer, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. This is because cultures are governed by what psychologists refer to as “cultural display rules.” These are norms within a culture that dictate how it’s appropriate to express your emotions.
In other words, all of us express emotions in our faces and mannerisms—but how often and how intensely is dictated by culture.
Meyer states that the key to evaluating where a culture lies on the disagreement spectrum is to ask yourself: How much would openly disagreeing with someone harm your relationship? Ignore how emotionally open they are.
Meyer uses a quadrant to visually express the relationships between how cultures disagree and how they display their emotions. However, we found this unnecessarily confusing. So instead, we’ll simply discuss the three main reasons Meyer posits for why a culture’s level of comfort with disagreement is not always related to how comfortable they are with emotional displays.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Erin Meyer's "The Culture Map" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full The Culture Map summary :
- The eight axes you can use as a framework to analyze cultural differences
- How to better relate to those of another culture to accomplish business goals
- How the Vikings have more gender equality than we see today
