The Effect Of Directness In Communication, In An International Team, On Advice Giving And Taking Process

Nowadays, most of the important decisions are not made alone. People areinteracting with each other, giving and receiving recommendations, in order to maketimely and well-considered decisions. Moreover, due to the globalization which hasgathered momentum during the last decades, great deals of political or economicissues are now discussed by multicultural persons. However, when people withdifferent cultural background are making decisions together, divergences incommunication become clearly significant.The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of communicationstyles, in an international team, on decision making choice and behavior. Based onthe literature review, we first built an accurate conceptual model and formulatedhypotheses. The independent variables were communication formulation (positivedirect, negative indirect and positive interrogative indirect) and communication way(text, voice, video), and the dependent variables represented objective and subjectivedecision-making measurements. Chinese-American cross-cultural team was studied inthis research. A computer-mediated3x3experiment was conducted with72Chinesestudents as decision makers and2American students as advisors. Basic descriptivestatistics, ANOVA and Post-Hoc tests were used for testing the hypotheses.The results confirmed expectations that Chinese as decision makers weremore willing to change their decision and ranked higher their perceived influencewhen the advice was formulated using a positive direct formulation, and when it wasconveyed using video. We also found evidence that indirect communicationformulations had less effect on the decision makers’ perceived influence when theinformation was conveyed using text messages. Finally, it also came out that positivecommunication formulations had a stronger impact on trust when the communicationway used to provide the advice was based on a listening way (voice or video).