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 Dr Anna Murdoch, Warsaw School of Economics reviews
some costs of culture shock in the process of adaptation of human
capital during temporary migration.
I have been studying and researching the field of cross-cultural
management (and related mostly interdisciplinary areas) over the past
10 years. Prior to the current project I investigated some possible
links between migration directions and culture dimensions, which I
described in an article in Dialogue and Universalism, 5-6/2006. A couple of the conclusions from the ‘Migration – Culture Dimensions’
topic have inspired me to take a closer look at some costs that
migrants (including expatriate managers and their families) might incur
during a sojourn abroad.
At the same time I was guiding and monitoring a qualitative academic
project conducted by a group of students from the Students’ Scientific
Association of Cross-Cultural Management, which I have the honour to
supervise. The notes I took during their research (in which they
attempted to identify and analyse some costs of culture shock suffered
by their foreign exchange peers) and my direct observations of the
foreign exchange students’ coping mechanisms (such as a lot of illness
and absenteeism, as well as some dysfunctional behaviour) gave me ideas
as to how to design a research tool (a survey with a statistically
relevant number of respondents). This I later applied to identify the
most problematic adaptation areas among foreign executives currently
resident in Poland.
The core idea was to apply the Hofstede values framework in a series of (coded) statements referring to:
1) professional arena,
2) social/community/ public space.
The exercise’s main objective was to establish a possible relationship
between some costs of migration/relocation and culture dimensions. The
conditions of the test were controlled in the sense that all potential
respondents had to fulfil two conditions: be ‘genuine’ expats and be
currently resident in Poland. I would ‘ruthlessly’ disqualify any
‘fake’ expats (by comparing answers to Questions 1 and 35). Another way
to screen the respondents was to accept self-selecting voluntary
respondents only. I was able to do that thanks to the generous and
‘academia friendly’ approach of the BPCC who very graciously agreed to
place my plea for respondents on their website Hofstede’s (1980) four
dimensions of culture are as follows:
Individualism (IDV) focuses on the degree the society reinforces individual or collective achievement and interpersonal relationships.
Power Distance Index (PDI) focuses on the degree of equality, or inequality, between people in the country’s society.
Masculinity (MAS) focuses on the degree the society
reinforces, or does not reinforce, the traditional masculine work role
model of male achievement, control, and power.
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) focuses on the level of tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity within the society, e.g. unstructured situations.
The graph below presents those four dimensions in a compact comparative way:
I established my pool of target respondents among expat executives
and/or their spouses, business people, diplomats and TEFL teachers (all
currently resident) in Poland. The project took about 6-7 months (the
very process of sending out the questionnaires and collecting the
answers only took about three to four weeks). I first presented the
initial results at the international conference on ‘Costs and Benefits of International Mobility’ (18 October 2006 at the Warsaw School of Economics). I am now nearing the completion of the project report.
I designed the questionnaire with the following objectives in mind:
• it had to be simple, accessible (user-friendly) and brief. Ideally it
should be a 30-second test, in other words: it shouldn’t take more than
30 seconds to fill in. That is why I decided to limit the respondents’
choice by allowing them to hit one answer only; even if they wanted to
select more answers it was technically impossible,
• the language had to be identifiable (and related to) by native and non-native speakers,
• I decided to use colloquial language in Questions 3 and 4, basing
this on the (psychological) theory that feelings are translated into
colloquial phrases.
I had to consider the following issues, some of which were serious
constraints and/or potential risk factors, as well as limitations.
The project is of an extremely sensitive nature. This is not only
caused by the fact that I chose a topic (cultural differences and their
implications) in itself subject to various political correctness
pressure as well as ‘ideological’ manipulation. The very fact I took
the risk to explore the costs (sometimes non-measurable and often
impossible to present as a set of ‘tax-deductible’ – to use this
metaphor – quantity) was not PC. A ‘properly balanced’ study would
specify both the ‘good things about Poland’ and the ‘Polish quirks’. I
cut across this, since – at least in this area – likes and dislikes are
subjective and less interesting to an academic. I went for the
‘irritants’ or ‘aggravants’ only. I do have a pretty clear idea what
the good things about Poland are (the often repeated list of advantages
would include ‘cheap booze’ and ‘travel opportunities’). A future study
of mine will focus on the benefits. In this study I focused on the
‘costs’ side. Nevertheless, I took several steps to ensure objectivity
(and to satisfy my internal commitment to ‘truth’ as well as academic
discipline criteria).
These were:
• scrambling the answers to stop possible „guesswork” from respondents
• coding several answers in Questions 3 and 4 in the same category
(i.e., PDI, UAI, IND, MAS), which was unknown to the respondents
• disqualifying ‘fake’ expats from the answer pool and the valid sample
• carrying out a meticulously thorough pilot stage (six individuals as
pilots, using their feedback on the technical, lexical and content
aspects of the questionnaire, modifying the questionnaire, getting the
support of two independent IT professionals for technical advice) and
• making sure each respondent was guaranteed anonymity yet each was
identifiable to the researcher (there is a rigour of Confidentiality
Clause).
I placed the advertisement for volunteers on the BPCC website, in the
American Friends of Warsaw Newsletter, on a couple of Internet
professional discussion forums, in various „expat letter chains and
circles”. I also used my own personal network.
The following assumptions have underlain the project rationale:
• everybody in a migration situation goes through culture shock
• political correctness and other outside pressure (sometimes
internalised) will distort the results – self-selection of respondents
and a special design of the questionnaire will take care of this bias
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• the psychological costs of culture shock expressed through the feelings of irritation is a given
• all the ‘irritants’ have been listed, any other possible ‘irritants’ must be ignored
• respondents – as individuals – represent their culture’s aggregate measures for culture dimensions, and
• one answer (predetermined but subjectively picked) in each area is
the researcher’s conscious choice – her assumption being that
respondents will act on an impulse and the ‘one answer only’ strategy
will reflect their ‘gut reaction’.
The following hypotheses accompanied my assumptions:
• some costs of culture shock will exhibit themselves as being more vulnerable to physical illnesses while abroad
• respondents will have most trouble with Power Distance, i.e., the
answers they will choose will mostly fall into the category of PDI
• High Power Distance in Poland will be negatively related with the
respondents one’s own national aggregate values for PDI, in other words
the lower the PD value for their national culture, the more irritating
they will find the behaviours in Poland typical for a country with a
high PD
• on a meta-level: respondents will reveal attitudinal information through volunteering additional information.
60 people’s answers were fully qualified, several answers were rejected
either through their ‘nationality’ ambivalence (or the ‘fake’ expat
syndrome), through technological hiccups or other ambiguities or
uncertainties.
One cannot say that the sample truly represented the foreign working
population in Poland – the most recent count obtained from GUS for the
year 2004 stated that almost 7,000 foreigners were employed in Poland
as of December 31, 2004 (men 6048, women 1625). Another figure (source:
‘Demographic Statistics Yearbook for the year 2004’)
gives the number of foreigners who were granted work permits in 2004 as
almost twice as much, but for the benefit of this study we’ll stick to
the first figure since it refers to large companies (which would fall
into the Murdoch survey sample pool source).
Out of the 60 qualified respondents 53 were men, 7 were women. They came from the following countries:
They were mostly ‘senior’ in age:
‘senior’ in the number of years of education:
and senior in terms of professional hierarchy (img 1).
The answers they chose in Question 3 (‘the most irritating feature in
professional life’) fell mostly into the Power Distance category (22
answers), and the statement which scored most votes was: ‘Polish
employees always want to be told what to do’ (9); and also into the
Uncertainty Avoidance category (25 answers) where the statement with
the most votes was: ‘I am tired of all the excuses my Polish
employees/colleagues give me as to why something hasn’t been done’ (10
votes).
The answers they chose in Question 4 (‘the feature irritating you MOST
in community/social/public space in Poland’) fell mostly into the PDI
category, and the two most ‘popular’ choices were: ‘There is too much
bureaucracy’ (16) and ‘Aggressive drivers in Poland drive me mad’ (21).
Out of the hypotheses I had formulated, the ‘sickness’ theory has not
been conclusively confirmed (25 per cent of the respondents said they
suffered more from illnesses while in Poland. Also 19 out of 21
students admitted to being sick in Poland more. Age (and/or being a
seasoned cross-cultural individual) has something to do with, no
doubt. Being more prone to illness is a known factor of culture shock,
in the future it would be interesting to look how this tendency
decreases with age and more international exposure.
However, after only this academic exercise it is impossible to answer
whether or not the adaptation process is indeed correlated with a high
discrepancy between the expat’s own measures of culture (which may not
be as lightly quantifiable as Hofstede and his followers – including
myself – would like to believe), or it just happens that Poland and
Poles score extremely high on the UAI and above average in the PDI
level, which, in turn, causes expats in Poland so much grief both at
work and in social/community/public space.
I am painfully aware of the weaknesses that this study is burdened with:
• the fact that women are underrepresented
• that further/more detailed analysis as per gender specific observations has not been allowed in this test
• that statement coding is intuitive rather than empirically verified
(which was additionally proven to me by one of the astute guests at the
‘Costs and Benefits of International Mobility’ conference where I first
presented the results, who remarked that ‘aggressive driving’ could
have just as easily been interpreted as the IDV factor, and NOT the PDI
code which I had insisted on)
• that culture dimensions are not equally represented by the number of statements
• and, finally, that the sample – although credible, very well targeted
and extremely valuable – is rather small and, therefore, the results
should not be used unconditionally or extrapolated from at this stage.
Perhaps the most significant conclusions of a somewhat practical nature are for the moment:
• the dimensions most expats in Poland find as most troublesome (PDI,
UAI and – possibly – IND) are unlikely to change visibly in the
foreseeable future (and this is what our guru, Geert Hofstede, firmly
says),
• so the costs of an expat sojourn may indeed be higher than what you had bargained for.
On the other hand (and on a more positive note):
• the benefits of relocation require a separate study,
• a comparative study of costs and benefits would present a much more balanced picture.
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