ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

144 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPcausal cultural paradigms. In the low-context, unidirectional culture,events have clear universal meanings; in the high-context,mutual causality culture, events can be understood only in context,meanings can vary, categories can change, and causality cannot beunambiguously established.Though this distinction has more meaning when one comparescountries or large ethnic units, it has utility for organizations as well.For example, DEC was a high-context culture in which the meaningof words and actions depended on who was speaking and underwhat conditions. Managers knew each other well and always tookinto account who the actors were. When a senior manager wasobserved publicly punishing a subordinate for doing something“dumb,” this sometimes simply meant that the subordinate shouldhave gotten buy-in from a few more people before going off on hisown. Ciba-Geigy, by contrast, was a low-context culture in whichmessages tended to have the same meaning no matter whom theywere coming from. To be labeled “dumb” at Ciba-Geigy would havebeen a severe negative judgment.When we refer to “language,” we often overlook the role of context.We assume that when one has learned the language of anothercountry, one will be able to understand what is going on and takeaction. But as we know all too well from our own cross-culturaltravel experiences, language is embedded in a wider context inwhich nonverbal cues, tone of voice, body language, and other signalsdetermine the true meaning of what is said. A vivid examplefrom my own experience was the previously cited senior managementmeeting of the British oil company at which I thought Iobserved polite explanations from the chairman, only to be told laterthat he had never been more brutal than he was at that meeting.Moralism-PragmatismA useful dimension for comparing groups on their approach to realitytesting is an adaptation of England’s (1975) moralism-pragmatismscale. In his study of managerial values, England found that