Intercultural Conflict Between Chinese And American Colleagues In China-Based MNCs

In the context of economic globalization, China has become a more and more attractive foreign investment arena. As more and more multinational companied set their headquarters, branches or offices in China, how to facilitate effective communication between colleagues coming from diverse cultural backgrounds has been an issue getting much attention from researchers in business management, sociology, communication and other fields. As two contrasting cultures, the cultural comparison between China and American has been a heated topic for a long time. This paper reports on a comparative study focusing on one important aspect of organizational behavior - conflict management - and tries to explore how employees from China address conflict differently from employees from America (utilizing the conflict styles research of Rahim and Ting-Toomey). The relationship between cultural constructs (using Dorfman & Howell's survey) and conflict management styles were also investigated.To accomplish this research, I conducted an online quantitative survey and then did interviews as a confirmatory follow up study. For the survey, 157 responses were collected, out of which 139 are valid, with 81 for China and 58 for America. 8 in-depth interviews were conducted for the follow up study to elicit deeper explanations for people's adoption of particular conflict styles. The conclusions include that in the MNCs investigated, Americans are found to rate higher in the preference for all five conflict management styles: dominating style, integrating style, compromising style, obliging style and avoiding style. Among the five styles, the integrating style is found to be the most preferred to both groups, while dominating and avoiding styles are the least preferred. Out of the four major cultural constructs posited by Hofstede, uncertainty avoidance appears to be the strongest predictor of conflict management styles. Individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity and power distance are shown to have strong influence respectively on the avoiding style, integrating and compromising style, and then the dominating style.