Conflict cultures in the workplace – what leaders of culturally diverse teams should know

In culturally and linguistically diverse teams, team leaders need to be aware of various communicative strategies that employees from different speech communities conventionally use in the workplace, according to Nadine Thielemann and Zlatoslava Savych  

Modern workplaces are characterised by a high degree of freedom. Employees can often flexibly manage their daily tasks and organise their workflow to be more efficient. Organisations benefit from this flexibility and generally favour people who are intrinsically motivated and take advantage of these opportunities to unleash their creativity and improve their productivity levels. At the same time, this creates an organisational culture in which team leaders usually do not openly voice their expectations of how exactly the assigned tasks should be fulfilled and how the workflow should be organised, even though they often have such expectations.

If the implicit expectations are not met, people will feel discontent. This discontent can be expressed in a number of different ways, and the communicative practices used may range from more conflict-oriented strategies to more solution-oriented approaches. For example, team leaders can communicate their dissatisfaction with the team member’s mistake through the strategic use of humour or adopt a more direct and explicit communicative strategy when referring to the employee’s incorrect behaviour. Such communicative practices represent a form of moral communication, also referred to as moralising. As a rule, when implicit expectations are not fulfilled, team members need to engage in moral communication and negotiate the behavioural and communicative norms that lead to divergent expectations. By doing this, team members can talk the problematic issues through until consensus is reached and thus avoid long-term tensions and conflicts. The ways in which people engage in moral communication may vary across cultures and, therefore, team leaders need to be aware of different communicative practices of negotiating norms at work.

In our 2021 research, we have investigated cultural differences and culture-specific communicative practices that are used to deal with failures in the workplace. The identified communicative practices point to the culture-specific ways in which interpersonal relationships are conceptualised in the workplace. In addition, our findings reveal different ways of managing rapport, or in other words, of constructing and maintaining harmony in workplace interactions across cultures. The culture-specific rapport management strategies should not be taken at their face value but simply viewed as conventionalised ways of dealing with conflictual issues. Awareness of such differences, however, is crucial in linguistically and culturally diverse workplaces and thus in most workplaces in a globalised world.

Discourse scenarios

We designed discourse scenarios in which participants from different speech communities (French, German in Austria and German in Germany, Polish and Russian) had to specify how they would act in a given situation in the role of a team leader. According to the discourse scenarios, an employee failed to meet a particular expectation in the workplace. In one situation, for example, a team member has not completed the assigned task on time and this threatened to derail the whole project. The elicited responses illustrate how these conflictual issues are conventionally settled in the given speech communities.

Our data analysis shows that, when confronted with a team member’s error or failure, the team leader’s strategies of dealing with this problem tend to differ in several regards. The German, Austrian, Russian and Polish participants, for example, tended not to mention the employee’s failure to complete the task on time and often merely described the context in which this failure happened (e.g. ‘I just wanted to talk to you about our project’). By doing this, the team leader tries to avoid any kind of direct confrontation and the critical incident can only be inferred from the context of the message. This allows the team member to maintain their professional image even in critical situations and in light of their mistake. In contrast, the French participants explicitly referred to the team member’s failure to finish the task which points to a greater role of authority and hierarchical differences in the workplaces in France (e.g. ‘I still have not received your part of the project work’). This way of conceptualising interpersonal relationship at work enables superiors to commit actions that threaten the professional image of an employee.

We also found that team leaders across cultures tend to adopt a solution-oriented approach. This means that they tried to construct a scenario in which the problems caused by the employee’s failure could be solved. However, we observed cultural differences in the conflict resolution strategies the research participants preferred. The Russian and Polish participants predominantly resorted to directives to give an explicit and succinct account of what needs to be done to rectify the team member’s mistake. They, for example, asked the team member to complete the assigned task right away or gave them very clear and detailed instructions on how to proceed if that is not possible. The French respondents adopted a similar approach and clearly defined the ways in which the problem should be solved. Both speakers of Slavic languages and French speakers resorted to completely different strategies than the German-speaking research participants. The Austrian and German respondents adopted a rather democratic and egalitarian approach and suggested finding a solution to the problem together with the team member (e.g. ‘If you think you cannot complete the task, please contact me and we will look for a solution together’). By collaboratively finding the suitable solution, the team leader helps the team member to redress their professional image. This strategy also enables the employee to maintain their autonomy of action. Interestingly, this was not the case in our Slavic and French data.

Interpersonal relationships

Our research thus indicates that interpersonal relationships at work are managed differently across cultures. The ways in which superiors communicatively deal with a subordinate’s professional image and their desire for autonomy are directly related to the ways in which power is enacted and hierarchical relations are managed at work. Such differences, however, may cause irritations and conflicts in multicultural teams where team members’ professional communicative conventions are different. These communicative conventions run the risk to be interpreted literally, for example, as an authoritarian or a weak and indecisive leadership style, and may lead to tensions, stress and lower efficiency in the whole team. It is thus important not to take such differences at their face value but to understand them as communicatively conventionalised ways of handling critical situations in a particular speech community.

In culturally and linguistically diverse teams, team leaders need to be aware of various communicative strategies that employees from different speech communities conventionally use in the workplace. Even when they switch to English as a lingua franca, people may still stick to their communicative practices, for example, by being too direct and coming across as impolite or being too indirect and failing to achieve their communicative goals. This may lead to irritations and conflicts in the workplace and potentially have negative outcomes both for the individuals involved and the organisation as a whole. To effectively manage such situations, employees should be encouraged to reflect on their cultural norms and communicative conventions in order to be able to discuss and negotiate their expectations with others and then arrive at shared understanding. In addition, it is worth investing in intercultural trainings and awareness-raising workshops. Such trainings and workshops are essential to helping employees become aware of how their behavioural norms and communication styles guide their expectations about what constitutes appropriate behaviour and influence how they interpret the meanings conveyed by their colleagues. Intercultural trainers will also assist employees with enhancing their intercultural sensitivity and equip them with strategies that help to effectively deal with linguacultural diversity and the associated communicative challenges.

This article is based on their academic publication‘Thielemann, Nadine; Göke, Regina; Savych, Zlatoslava.2021. Motzen und Moral. Eine kontrastiv pragmatische Pilotstudie zur Unzufriedenheitskommunikation am universitären Arbeitsplatz (FR – DE – AT – PL – RU). Zeitschrift für Slawistik 66 (1), 140-173’.