Cross-Cultural Communication Challenges between Swedish Managers and Burmese and Vietnamese Employees: How are those Communication Challenges related to GLOBE’s Cultural Dimensions?

Abstract: This study investigates the cross-cultural communication challenges between the Swedish managers and their local employees from the perspectives of Swedish managers in Burmese and Vietnamese organisations. It adopts mixed models in which it embraces, both, the deductive and inductive approaches. The deductive study was conducted to derive the Swedish managers’ perceptions of the cultural dimensions of the local organisations using the GLOBE’s instrument. The inductive study was conducted to explore the challenges based on the cultural perceptions and to identify the relationship between the challenges and the cultural dimensions. This study also identifies the similarities and differences in the cultural dimensions between Myanmar and Vietnam. The countries for this research, Myanmar and Vietnam, have not yet been included in GLOBE’s current research. Therefore, it motivated us to conduct this study by using the GLOBE’s instrument on those two countries. The findings from this investigation are not only an effort to understand how the GLOBE’s nine cultural dimensions are related to the communication challenges of the Swedish managers in Myanmar and Vietnam; to a greater degree it is also to emphasise further on the challenges and their causes to improve on future cooperation between Sweden and the host nations, Myanmar and Vietnam. The findings showed that the majority of the interviewed Swedish managers in both regions face similar communication challenges such as reluctance of employees to raise issues, language barriers between the employees and the Swedish managers as well as the difficulties of understanding the indirect communication. They provided that the causes for the communication problems are, among others, at the schooling system, social values of losing face and language proficiency of the local employees. It is difficult to generalise the findings because the challenges are varied based on the work environment and the different perceptions of the local culture by the Swedish managers. However, there are patterns that emerged from the findings, which display the relationship between the challenges and the cultural dimensions. The discovery of that relationship is the main theoretical contribution of this study. Moreover, the cultural insights of the experienced Swedish managers from this study can help the future foreign or Swedish managers who are moving to the region to understand the local culture better and prepare accordingly to the challenges.