The Effect of Individual Cultural

Abstract

Knowledge has become a key resource in the present economy, and sustainable strategic advantage can be created through sharing and communication of information in a competitive business environment. Communication provides the basis for the transition of ideas, direction and ultimately strategy in an organisation. For this reason, communication has become more strategic than ever before. This study is focussed on the communication behaviour of individuals in a hightech Research and Development environment. It is suggested that R&D organisations face significant challenges regarding the achievement of effective business communication because of the individual characteristics of employees found in R&D organisations. This study has two main objectives. Firstly, it makes use of grid-group culture theory to type employees in a R&D organisation according to four possible cultural biases (also called worldviews of ways of life), namely individualists, hierarchists, fatalists and egalitarians. Secondly, the study aims at establishing if there is any relationship between the cultural bias groups of individuals in a R&D organisation and their perceptions of and preferences for communication frequency, source and channel. The data for this quantitative study was obtained by convenient sampling of one of the largest R&D organisations in South Africa. A questionnaire for measuring cultural biases, communication perceptions and communication preferences was distributed to all 600 employees of the R&D Division of Sasol Technology (Pty) Ltd. The data was evaluated using acceptable statistical techniques, which included 1-way ANOVA, 2-way ANOVA and c2 tests for independence. The findings of this study indicate that employees in the R&D environment are iii predominantly individualists, which in itself poses a significant challenge to management, human resource and communication specialists due to the characteristics and world view if individualists. The fatalistic cultural bias in the R&D environment that was sampled was found to be negligible. It was further found that no relationship exists between the cultural bias groups of individuals in the R&D organisation and their perceptions of communication frequency, source and channel. These findings indicate that no communication perception differences exist between individualists, hierarchists and egalitarians, as the literature on culture theory and communication behaviour would suggest. Regarding communication preferences, a limited number of relationships were found between the cultural biases and the preferences for communication frequency, source and channel. The communication behaviour of the different cultural groups (i.e. individualists, hierarchists and egalitarians) were found to be consistent with grid-group culture theory. The prevalence of fatalists in the R&D organisation was found to be extremely low. From the findings of this study, it is concluded that grid-group culture typology is perhaps not the most appropriate framework for gaining a better understanding of communication behaviour, as the literature suggests. The findings also suggest that there are distinct differences in how employees would respond to questionnaires regarding their perceptions and preferences for communication. Furthermore, communication surveys should be very clear about what is measured to ensure that the results are not clouded by any uncertainty as a result of perception differences.