Jonathan Shao

09/15/2016
TF: Erik Woodward
READING: Sigal Barsade, Olivia ONeil, Manage your Emotional Culture, HBR, vol. 94 Issue
1, Jan-Feb 2016, (course packet pp. 3-10)
1. Ordinary people refer to corporate culture as the shared intellectual values, norms,
artifacts, and assumptions that serve as a guide for the group to thrive, otherwise known
as cognitive culture.
2. Cognitive culture sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work, such as how
customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented, or competitive they are.
3. Emotional culture is the shared affective values, norms artifacts, and assumptions that
govern which emotions people have and express at work and which ones they are better
off suppressing.
4. The key distinction being thinking versus feeling, cognitive culture is often conveyed
verbally, whereas emotional culture tends to be conveyed through nonverbal cues.
5. Ignoring emotional culture can cause companies to suffer as employees become callous
and indifferent and teams instead tolerate a culture of anger. The effects are especially
damaging during times of upheaval such as financial downturns and organizational
restructurings.
6. Companies that manage emotional culture well have better performance, quality, and
customer service and have fewer negative outcomes including poor performance and high
turnover, as leaders can motivate their employees.
7. All organizations have an emotional culture, even if it is one of suppression. It manifests
itself through employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and hard measures such as
financial performance and absenteeism.
8. According to social psychologist Phil Shaver, there are 135 distinguishable emotions,
with the main ones being joy, love, anger, fear, and sadness.
9. Listening to employees express their concerns so that they feel they are being heard and
helping them think about situations in a more constructive way is a step to take.
Cognitive reappraisal and considering plausible benign motivations for their colleagues
behavior will make them less likely to fixate on negative explanations.
10. A culture of fear makes it harder for employees to think well and act quickly as excessive
stress on the prefrontal cortex impairs executive functions such as judgment, memory,
and impulse control.

11. To create an emotional culture, youll need to get people to feel the emotions valued by
the organization by harnessing what people already feel, modeling the emotions you want
to cultivate, and getting people to fake it until they feel it.
READING: Thomas Donaldson, Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home, HBR, Sept-Oct
1996, (course packet pp. 11-28)
The US invests in foreign countries in order to find new markets for their goods and services, to
seek resources that are cheaper, to help build strategic assets, and to reorganize their overseas
holdings in response to broader economic changes.
1. The main ethical issues include resolving cultural differences between countries and
establishing codes of conduct for globally ethical business practice.
2. Cultural relativism states that no cultures ethics are better than any others and an
individuals beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that
individuals own culture. For example, bribery is a common business practice in some
areas, and so US businesses expanding into markets abroad may consider doing what
everyone else is doing.
3. An argument against cultural relativism is the culture of software piracy where most
people in some countries regard the practice as less unethical than people in other
countries do, which in turn might cause software companies to invest less in developing
new products, contribute to lost jobs and jeopardize livelihoods.
4.

Less developed countries have ineffective enforcement and inadequate regulations,

leading to transnational companies taking advantage of them.

5. Ethical imperialism is based on absolutism and directs people to do everywhere exactly

as they do at home. It is problematic as absolutists believe that there is a single list of
truths which clashes with the belief that different cultural traditions must be respected,
that they can be expressed only with one set of concepts, and that they call for exactly the
same behavior around the world.
6. The three core human values are the right to good health, the right to economic
advancement and improved standard of living, and the maintenance of reciprocity. These
can be translated into business by maintaining a safe work environment, protecting the
rights of employees and avoiding relationships that violate rights to adequate standards of
living.
7. The three core values are respect for human dignity, respect for basic rights, and good
citizenship. Companies can respect human dignity by creating and
sustaining a corporate culture in which employees, customers, and
suppliers are treated not as means to an end but as people whose
intrinsic value must be acknowledged, and by producing safe products
and services in a safe workplace. Companies can respect basic rights

by acting in ways that support and protect the individual rights of

employees, customers, and surrounding communities, and by avoiding
relationships that violate human beings rights to health, education,
safety, and an adequate standard of living. And companies can be
good citizens by supporting essential social institutions, such as the
economic system and the education system, and by working with host
governments and other organizations to protect the environment.
8. In countries with different ethical standards, there can exist a conflict of relative
development and a conflict of cultural tradition. A manager must ask whether the practice
would be acceptable at home if her country were in a similar stage of economic
development as well as ask whether or not actions violate a core human value.
9. No, a company should not invest in a foreign country where civil and political rights are
violated as it also violates the core human values.
10. No, a company should not go along with a host countrys discriminatory employment
practices as it violates the core human values.
11. When a host countrys ethical standards seem lower than the home countrys, the home
country should still use discretion and treat corporate values and formal standards of
conduct as absolutes.