Conversing across cultures: East-West communication styles in work and nonwork contexts

Four experiments provided evidence that East–West differences in attention to indirect meaning are more pronounced in work settings compared with nonwork settings as suggested by prior research on Protestant relational ideology. Study 1 compared errors in interpreting indirect messages in work and nonwork contexts across three cultures. Studies 2 and 3 examined differences in self-reported indirect-ness with coworkers versus nonwork acquaintances across three cultures controlling for variation in individualism–collectivism. Study 4 examined self-reported indirectness in bicultural managers and experimentally manipulated the salience of Western versus Eastern culture. The results showed that Americans, but not East Asians, were less attentive to indirect cues in work than nonwork settings and that East–West differences in indirectness were greater in work than nonwork settings. Imagine you are asking a colleague for feedback on your project proposal. She looks down, nervously shuffling the papers in front of her, and says, “The logic really needs tightening, and the methodology is problematic. But otherwise, you seem to have some very interesting ideas. ” How would you interpret this feed-back? Are you likely to focus on its explicit meaning, concludin