Probably one of the biggest impacts that technology has had on communication in public
organizations is that it has changed the dynamics of communication itself. According to
Denhardt, R., Denhardt, J., and Aristigueta (2013), “Use of e-mail in this way is changing
organizational structures, reporting relationships, and communication with clients and citizens”
(p. 293). The use of e-mails in place of face to face communication takes away from the
emphasis that might exist in a message, and can cause confusion because the full effect of the
message might get across better in person. For instance, an e-mail from a supervisor may not
have the same urgency as speaking face to face to an employee about a task that needs to be done
for an important client.
Reference
Denhardt, R. B., Denhardt, J. V., & Aristigueta, M. P. (2013). Managing human behavior in
public and nonprofit organizations (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
In order to be an effective leader, a person must be aware of the cultural and generational
differences that exist within their staff because otherwise they will not understand how best to
deal with them. Communication can be tricky with two people that are from the same cultural
and generational background when power is involved as a leader needs to be able to walk a line
between making a worker feel as though they are valued without the leader giving up their power
to the employee, but adding in those cultural and generational differences can make it that much
more difficult. A leader who manages others will not be very successful if there are a lot of
misunderstandings in the workplace among the different employees. Cultural competency is
very helpful in learning to deal with the diversity that exists in the workplace, both with other
cultures and with other generations which could be considered their own subculture within the
culture that will make a leader most effective.
There are five skills that a leader can use to improve their own cultural competency, and
can apply towards their employees learning to help reduce friction in the workplace among
employees. The first is being aware and willing to accept the differences that exist between the
person’s culture and other cultures. The next is being aware of their own culture. Another skill
is dynamics of differences in which the person is aware of what can go wrong in communication
across different cultures, which means that they can find ways around them. Another skill is
understanding the culture of clients outside of the workplace as this could have implications on
how the employees interact with the clients, and the clients’ perspective of the agency.
Adaptation is the last skill, and means that a person is able to take general information and better
fit it to the culture being worked with by the individual.
Hall’s Model of cultural competency focuses on evaluating cultures in the context of each
culture using high-context culture and low-context culture. A high-context culture is one that is
not overly explicit in their conversations, but they believe that they are understood by what they
do say whereas a low-context culture is one that may give more details to express themselves in
comparison to the high-context cultural person. This also going into how a person from each
culture looks at time, with there being cultures that are monochromic and others being
polychronic. According to Denhardt, R., Denhardt, J., and Aristigueta (2013):
P-People (polychronic), who tend to belong to high-context cultures, are almost never
alone, and they prefer to do more than one activity at a certain point in time. M-people,
most likely to be found in low-context cultures, are individualists, appreciate punctuality,
exactness, and scheduling, and prefer to do only one activity at a time. (p. 305)
This can be a general window into the lives of different cultures if the manager is aware of which
cultural context a person’s culture may be a part of as it can help to explain their behaviors, and
give managers the best clues on how to work with them.
The generational diversity that is occurring in many workplaces can be as difficult as
cultural diversity for managers to be able to deal with because each generation is almost like
their own new culture that is just enough different from the generation that comes before or after
them. There are traditionalists, baby boomers, Generation Xers and the millennials for the
manager to have to learn how to delegate between each of these different generations. One
interesting difference that can play a large role in the workplace and the different generations is
feedback. A supervisor may find that they have to offer different levels of feedback based on the
generations that their employees are a part of because each looks at the workplace a little
differently. Traditionalists come from the generation where they do not expect feedback unless
there is something wrong with the way that they are performing their job, but other generations
are not quite the same in the way that they view feedback. Millennials may get nervous without
any feedback on how well they are performing their tasks and duties, and a manager may find
that their workers will be better employees if they get this feedback, positive or negative.
The major takeaway from this topic is that a true leader is one that is able to have cultural
competency because it helps them be effective with all individuals. They understand what it
takes to deal with other cultures, even subcultures of their own culture, and do so with a
minimum of misunderstanding. This is the type of person that is willing to learn about other
cultures, and are willing and able to adapt to what they find. These cultural differences may
come from a person moving from another country or a leader going to a new country, but it can
also come from within the same culture of the leader as generational differences can exist, as
well.