Activiteiten formulier/ Handreiking

Bijlage bij het ONA-logboek

Naam cursist: Raiane Carmo Inacio
Code cursus: ONA
Thema: 7. Work Culture
Tijd: 12 hours

Description Activity 1:
For this activity I have decided to read the book: The culture map
Writtten by: Erin Meyer
Number of pages: 288

I consider the information shared in the book ‘the culture map’ valuable, especially because in The
Netherlands there are a lot of people from different cultures working together.
The book has 8 chapters, each chapter talks about a different part of the culture map.
Chapter 1 of the book is about communication between different cultures, it gives different examples
of cultures being very direct (in your face) when communicating and others that are considered more
as listeners. The second chapter of the book is about evaluating and giving negative feedback. In
some countries you can give negative feedback to someone in front of a group, as the job and the
person are considered two separate things. In other cultures, you should be careful and try to give
more in-direct negative feedbacks, more in phases.
 Activiteiten formulier/ Handreiking

Chapter 3 is called persuasion in a multicultural world and describes how some cultures first explain
and argument how they conclude, where in other cultures people first talk about the conclusion and
then eventually explain how they arrived there.
Chapter 4 talks about leadership and this was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me. It
describes how leadership works in different cultures. You can have a egalitarian leader who is really
part of the team and considers everyone’s opinion or a hierarchical leader, which is very
straightforward and does not like any input from others.
Chapter 5 is about making decisions and in my opinion is strongly connected to leadership. In a
consensual working culture, before a decision is made on a high level in an organization, first
consensus needs to be collected on a lower level. In a ‘Top-down’ culture decisions will be made on a
higher level in the organization and just communicated. In the work culture that I know (Brazil) the
last one is the most common.
Chapter 6 talks about trust, a very important subject in the work culture. In general, the book
describes 2 types of trust: Trust that you can get by the activities you performed or trust can be more
based on the relationship, in work cultures where the people are more friends than colleagues.
Chapter 7 is about disagreement and talks mainly about how different cultures deal with
disagreements. Some cultures are very direct and confrontational. In my country, Brazil, the work
culture is more non-confrontational and focused on avoiding conflicts.
The last chapter of the book is about scheduling and describes how different cultures deal with
planning. In some cultures, meetings are scheduled a long time in advance and being late is not
accepted at all. In other cultures, the timings are more flexible.
This book gave me a very interesting look into different aspects of working cultures around the world
and I think it may help me in understanding some situations when I will start working in The
Netherlands, where a lot of people from different part of the world work together.

Duur activiteit: 12 hours