A Comparative Study Of The American And Chinese Managers' Communication Style-From A Cross-cultural Perspective

The wheels of history running on the first decade of 21st century, with the development of society and the advancement of civilization, the limitation of communication is being broken. Culture and communication are interplaying so closely that the expansion of worldwide communication networks is heightening our awareness of the needs for understanding other cultures and people. The globalization is attaching profound significance to the emerging subject ---- cross-cultural communication; therefore, discussions on cultural difference and cross-cultural management are prevailing.A lot of scholars have been working on the comparison of communication between Chinese and Americans and proved that the two countries represented two poles apart in culture. In this present study, based on the cultural theories of Hofstede's individualism/collectivism and Hall's high/low-context, the theories of management communication, and the previous studies, the author explores a new model to compare the management communication style between Chinese and American managers, through a series of questionnaire investigation. The new model consists of four aspects: initiative taking, relationship constructing, information validity and communicative ways and four hypotheses are worked out correspondingly. Five hypotheses are proposed. The author employs an empirical research to test the four hypotheses so as to test the primary one that there are significant differences between the management communication of Chinese and American managers.A selected investigation of 60 managers from Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, 30 Chinese and 30 Americans, responded to the questionnaire survey. The author's 5 hypotheses are all supported. The investigation indicates that the American managers own a quite different management communication style compared to the Chinese ones. American managers show stronger tendencies to take initiative in communication, while Chinese ones are usually passive but pay more attention to construct relationship; American managers emphasize information validity and prefer direct ways while Chinese ones are implicit and indirect in most time. The author finally discusses the cultural roots for the evident disparity in order to provide some feasible suggestions for the cross-cultural management in Chinese enterprises.