For example, as mentioned before in this paper, for Chinese businesses where there is a horizontal out-group business environment, employees are at the same social status relevant to one another because they're from different groups. Due to China being inherently a high-context culture, where there's great encouragement of "outsiders" vs. "insiders", this level of equality and being of different groups breeds the circumstances for competition to arise. Whenever this type of competition arises, conflicts become more explicit and direct between participating parties for the allocation of scare resources within the organization. The same phenomena happens with US firms and employees, from different departments within the organization, who compete over the scare resources that are available. This is where the similarities of achieving the right social connections comes into play for both countries; managers vying for the limited number of resources tries to make connections with other influential members within the organization who can accomplish these tasks. This strategy is not only incorporated in the American business psyche, it is also the main …show more content…
The Chinese have a predominately collectivist mindset of life; they're more attuned with needs of others, and base their achievement and successes on the strength of the relationship between themselves and others. They also take the mindset that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; they look at the business in terms of "we" instead of the more individualistic, Western standing of "I". Due to their collective nature, how they weigh in on their communicative messages depends on the ability and the mission to either garner a strong connection or to maintain it. For example, in the American business setting, whenever there's a disagreement between a subordinate and a supervisor, there's more incentive for the subordinate to be more explicit in communicating that disagreement, even if it might cause a loss in reputation for that supervisor; again, Americans have a more individualistic outlook on the business world than the Chinese do. However, with the Chinese, the subordinates are encouraged to maintain and harmonize that relationship; if ever a disagreement were to arise between the subordinate and the supervisor, the subordinate must communicate it implicitly to protect the reputation of the boss and to make sure that the message is still conveying the important notification of the disagreement. Not only does this allow the Chinese business