India Culture study

I have been doing some interesting cross-cultural studies lately. Trying to understand how cultures differ and how people behave differently and why.

Hostede’s and Schwabs research in this area gave me a lot of understanding about cultures. Not only in the field of human factors for interaction design. But also in general life and in management.

Let me begin with some of this with the Indian perspective. How are western cultures different from ours here in India (Western – imply American that’s wild-wild-west). To begin with, we have analog cultures. Westerners have digital cultures. Their communication styles are low-context while ours are high-contextual. We mean a lot of things at the same time and we have strict behavior norms as to what is right what is wrong.

Have you observed that in India individual is normally on the highest rung. What this means is, most of our companies and governments are leader based. I mean most of the large companies in India have started and run by entrepreneur and not by managers. In the west it’s different. Most companies are run by managers and individual leaders are more based on rationality and not strict adherence.

In India leaders are followed without questioning, while in west leaders better have a nice way of getting things done. Leaders are more managers.

You can look at any website or company profile. In the west they speak of the brand and achievements as its force, while here in India we have the chairman’s message on the first page. We give more importance to leaders. Its here in cricket too, we believe more in Sachin then in team. Australia is different, they have great players but it is represented by the ‘team Australia’ be scared not its ‘Sachin’ be scared.

Let’s not blame bad players it’s in our culture. Its here in our blood we don’t believe in team culture. Our expectations are based on great leaders – Shivagi, Gandhiji we are very group oriented follower type of people. We place leadership views above rationality. Germany stands worse then us, no wonder Hitler has such a wild run everywhere.

But we are moving towards the digital world just like the Japanese are. Obeying parents and bosses is slowly reducing?. So is the fact that rank and position is not derived from age instead from qualities. We really are not observing so many of cultural reasons just for the heck of it any more. We are saying more things so that we are understood through emails, sms instead of the earlier you better comprehend what I am saying style.

My study is not so exact, my writing skills are still worse. All the same these are based on understanding of hofstede and his study of cultural dimensions. Which is text book for me for some time.