What about Disagreeing @Work?

By Fahad Alqahtani 

Let me explain this concept using Press Freedom Index results of 2019. If we considered that cultures that took centuries of emphasize by their members into account, we can predict which countries will support press freedom and which will make sure that freedom of expression will not harm their culture’s image. As leading structure will dominate law enforcement in extremely hierarchical cultures, confrontation of disagreement is a form of expression that is not considered as a well intended response regardless of how catastrophic is matter in hand might be.

As this chart demonstrates from Erin Meyer’s book, while typical Indians, Mexicans or a worker from Philippine have a cultural encouragement to express his/her sense of dissatisfaction from work or life in general, she exert a big effort not to confront authority that caused it in the first place as a sign of showing respect. On the other hand, French, Spanish and Americans seems to live in a culture that support expressing such feelings to the face of authority with various degrees of intensity.

So, here are results of Press Freedom Index with top ten out of 180 countries. You can see confrontational countries like Netherlands are among top ten who encourage confrontations (world’s 4th) even if they are not from a culture that would encourage individuals to be emotionally expressive.

Likewise, a country like China rank at the bottom of freedom index (World’s 177th) without being genuinely concerned.

So, I think it is more reasonable to expect each culture to defend their unique view and resist organizations of global reach (Like UN) to risk changing them to end up looking like the rest of human beings. As sad this may sound, but global organizations still need to spend more time and effort viewing slow progress in what they like to consider as “Universally accepted” agenda as just a romantic theory that needs deeper understanding of cultural ego.

 First figure (Figure 7.3) is scanned directory from the "The culture map" book by Erin Meyer - page 204

 Charts are screen shots from Reporters without boarders website - 2019 World Press freedom index:https://rsf.org/en/ranking