Journal Review 1 : A Cross Cultural Study of Communication Strategies for Building Business Relationships

Title	A Cross Cultural Study of Communication Strategies for Building Business Relationships
Author	Yunxia Zhu, Pieter Nel and Ravi Bhat
Journal	International Journal of Cross Cultural Management
Publication	2006; 6; 319. DOI: 10.1177/1470595806070638
Abstract	This study aims to explore communication strategies for relationship building across cultures from a linguistic as well as a culture-specific perspective. Specifically, it sees business relationships as part of social capital and compares communication strategies used to build relationships in sales firms. The research method is based on a discourse analysis of interviews with business managers, which also incorporates their success stories. In the analysis, relationship building is divided into two stages: the initiating stage and the maintaining stage. It has been found that more interpersonal strategies have been employed by Chinese and Indian business managers when initiating a business relationship. In contrast, the New Zealand and South African managers tend to use more impersonal communication strategies to promote public relations. Similar interpersonal communication strategies are employed in all the target cultures for maintaining relationships. However, a stronger orientation for long-term relationships in the Chinese and Indian cultures has been identified. Furthermore, the communication strategies are dynamic in all the countries investigated since they are becoming more and more multicultural and increasingly globalized in international business and management.
Goals	Specifically these research questions are proposed: • What does ‘business relationship’ mean across cultures? • What specific communication strategies does each of the target cultures employ to initiate business relationships? • What specific communication strategies does each of the target cultures employ to further develop and maintain business relationships? In order to answer these questions, the article first provides some background information about each of the target cultures. Second, it develops a conceptual framework based on social capital and intercultural communication. A particular culture-specific dimension of exploring the semantics of relationship building is recommended to complement these dimensions. The research method is based on both interviews with business managers and genre analysis of their success stories. The research method section details the data of success stories collected from business executives. The fourth section discusses findings on how these managers, who are also the main characters of the success stories, have specifically applied the communication strategies to initiate and maintain relationships. The article concludes with findings on the differences between New Zealand and China, and the implications for understanding the dynamics of relationship building.
Problems	This study attempts to go beyond these limits and employ both intercultural dimensions and culture-specific perspectives to compare communication strategies for building business relationships across New Zealand, Chinese, Indian and South African cultures. These four cultures are chosen for analysis for the following reasons. First, New Zealand is located in the Asian Pacific region, along with China and India, and is also developing close international trade ties with countries in this region and this kind of frequent contact requires further understanding of each other’s culture. Second, New Zealand has a significant proportion of immigrants from China, India and South Africa, and comparing and understanding these cultures will shed light on a better understanding between these cultures. Third, South African culture is included here since it may share some similarities with the New Zealand culture as a multicultural society and it would be insightful to explore the dynamics and implications for relationship building in a rapidly changing world. Last but not least, there is a personal reason to compare these cultures : each of the authors comes from one of these cultures and all have lived in New Zealand for at least five years.
Theories	Extensive research has been done in business relationship building, in particular in the area of marketing relationship (e.g. Arias, 1998; Dwyer et al., 1987). The marketing relationship is often used as a universal concept in the study of business relationship building, such as with guanxi (connections) (Arias, 1998). In today’s world of globalization and internationalization of businesses, the marketing relationship is becoming increasingly important as a means to meet the marketing needs of sales firms. However, when it comes to establishing specific business relationships in a particular culture, business people can resort to their own cultural values and communication strategies, which may go beyond the area of marketing to include broader social dimensions. Social capital theory (e.g. Lin, 2001) can be of relevance for exploring these social dimensions and relevant communication strategies. Existing literature, however, has given little attention to exploring specific communication strategies for establishing business relationships, and even less has been done from a culture-specific perspective. Intercultural dimensions such as proposed by Hofstede (1991) and Hall (1976) may shed light on the understanding of different communication strategies used to establish business relationships. For example, Grosse (2002) made an attempt to explore relationship building in relation to communication strategies. She mainly used intercultural dimensions to compare American and Latin American cultures, but these cultural dimensions tend to have the presumption that all cultures can be categorized by these kinds of polarized differences, thus ignoring the specific communication strategies each culture employs.
Methods	The data are drawn and updated from open-ended interviews with business executives of all the target cultures. Fifteen business managers from each culture were interviewed, making a total of 60 across the four cultures. For each country, the interview were conducted in between two and three major cities. Only European New Zealanders and European South African cultures were included in the discussion. However, we were very much aware of the changing face of the countries, which probably deserves another topic of discussion. The interview results and the managers’ success stories were transcribed. The interview questions were composed of three sections in light of the dimensions proposed in the conceptual framework. The managers were first asked to define relationship building in their own language, and then their views on the communication strategies in each of the relationship building processes were solicited. As a third task, the managers were invited to provide a success story about how they initiated and maintained a successful business relationship. Altogether 15 success stories were collected from each culture, which again makes the total of 60. Both interview results and success stories are analysed using the proposed conceptual framework. The units for analysing the stories were based on social interactions embedded in the story and the genre approach is used to identify the interactions. According to Orlikowski and Yates (1994), genre is characterized by its purpose, form and content, which are often used as criteria for identifying organizational genres such as stories and business documents (Louhiala Salminen, 1997; Zhu, 2005). Both purpose and content are seen as the major areas for understanding the success stories. Content can be analysed in the idea unit of moves. A move is a communicative event which also refers to the strategies used in a text, and form refers to the linguistic features of realizing the moves and purposes (Zhu, 2005). Specifically, the following purposes and moves are seen as essential for analysis: • Purposes: Promoting business initiatives vs. establishing other types of relationships such as friendship. • Initiating moves: Communication strategies for initiating relationships. • Maintaining moves: Communication strategies to further develop and maintain relationships. • End-result moves: Long-term vs. short term relationships. In this way, the focus of analysis is placed on the purposes and content. This focus is also congruent with the proposed aim of identifying communication strategies as shown earlier in this article.
Findings	This article developed a feasible conceptual framework for comparing communication strategies of building business relationships across cultures from both linguistic and intercultural perspectives. Compared to marketing relationships, social capital theory offers a broader perspective to view business relationships as a social construct intertwined with social networking activities. Specific definitions were used to complement the study of communication strategies, and offered further explanation about why certain communication strategies were employed to build relationships. As shown in the managers’ own definitions, relationship building was defined in close relation with the sociocultural and economic contexts of each culture. Each of the four target cultures also clearly showed cultural dynamics in a changing business and multicultural context, which indicates the need to study this topic in a broader social dimension.  It has been found that different cultures tended to emphasize different values – such as marketing relationships and ‘old mates’ for the New Zealand culture, guanxi or friendship for the Chinese, jan pehchan or right connections for the Indians, and a mixture of business relationships and utbuntu for South Africans. This further indicates that even if business managers share similar goals, as shown in the business managers’ views, they still resort to different communication strategies for building and maintaining business relationships. For example, different communication strategies were employed for initiating business relationships: both Chinese and Indian managers resorted to interpersonal communication strategies such as one-to-one meetings, while impersonal strategies such as seminars and public meetings were found to be more frequently used by the New Zealand and South African managers. More similarities in communication strategies were identified across the target cultures in the stage of maintaining relationships, and all tended to use more interpersonal communication strategies that involved specific communication strategies tailored for the continuation of the existing relationship. However, significant differences were also identified in terms of goal orientations, and more intrinsic goals were found in the Chinese and Indian cultures, which can be seen as the continuation of the long-term tendency already in existence in the initiating stage. Further differences were also in existence between the Chinese and Indian cultures, which can only be explained from the culture-specific perspective. Guanxi and caste are both collectivisitic-based networking systems but they differ in the way people are connected. In addition, there is no lack of differences in the individualistic cultures. New Zealand managers stressed ‘mates’ as part of the egalitarian approach, while South African managers placed much more emphasis on harmony and collaboration. These nuances of differences are crucial for understanding what communication strategies may be appropriate for each stage of the relationship development.
Conclusion	All these findings have been further supported by the success stories incorporated in the analysis, which offered an insider’s perspective into what the business executives actually did to develop business relationships. In addition, the dynamics of communication strategies for relationship building in the global and multicultural contexts have also been identified, as summarized in the section on success stories. Cultures are dynamic and developing and, in particular, individualistic cultures including New Zealand and South Africa have also applied interpersonal communication strategies in order to maintain longer-term relationships. In India and China, the dynamics also exist. Changes are also beginning to take place in China, and both traditional and modern marketing relationships already exist in India. These dynamics will continue as the world become more and more globalized. However, the traditional guanxi or jan pehchan won’t go away overnight since they were deeply rooted in the respective cultures long before the concept of business was ever in practice. They are essential for initiating business relationships for these cultures. It will be interesting to see how the dynamics develop and what new forms of relationship building take place under the influence of both traditional and modern marketing relationships. The research findings have implications for conducting international business and doing business across cultures, and also for developing social networking relations in general. In particular, an understanding of the differences in the preference of interpersonal and impersonal communication strategies at the initiating stage can help prevent potential intercultural barriers. According to Zhu and Sun (2004), intercultural business collaborations tend to collapse at the initiating stage. The nuances of differences between Chinese and Indian cultures and those between New Zealand and South African cultures also have implications for maintaining business relationships. Further research, however, needs to be conducted to see if similar types of preferences also exist in other cultures, more importantly to identify whether the cultural dynamics explored in this article also apply to other cultures.