Research Procedure - 文化對決策結果的影響：多明尼加共和國和台灣之比較

The research procedure is presented below with short definition of each step and at the end a diagram for the complete process.

(1) Background: Start with a brief background of the topic “Effect of culture on decision outcomes: Dominican Republic and Taiwan” to have a basic knowledge of the domain and develop a concrete idea to present what exactly the thesis is going to do and why.

(2) Motivation and objective: Develop a research problem that has not been addressed in literature and describe the objective that the research is going to reach.

(3) Research methods: Choose a relevant research method (qualitative survey approach) in which a research model is developed to derive the research findings. The sampling plan and data collection instrument, followed by the data analysis technique are addressed in this chapter.

(4) Analysis and results: Analyze the collected data and present the analysis results that confirm how close or assertive are related cultural dimensions. Implications and suggestions are also presented.

(5) Conclusion: Provide conclusions, suggestions, contribution, limitations, and future research directions for the readers and any person interested in the field.

Figure 1-3: Research process

Background Motivation and

Objective Research Method

Analysis and Results Conclusions

4 1.4 Thesis Overview

In the thesis, there are five chapters, and below are the contents in each chapter.

Chapter One Introduction: In this chapter, the thesis background, motivation, objective, research process, and thesis overview are included.

Chapter Two Literature review: In this chapter, the review of literature including journals and articles, related concepts used in the research, and proposition development are presented.

Chapter Three Research Method: In this chapter, the research model, the sample, the question outline, and the techniques used to analyze data are described.

Chapter Four Analysis Results and Discussion: In this chapter, the results of the data analysis and the propositions confirmations. Implications and suggestions are also addressed with respect to the effect of cultural dimensions.

Chapter Five Conclusions: In this chapter, the summarized research findings, the contribution and suggestions for the academic and practice, and future research directions are delineated.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Business Communication

Business communication is one of the most important tasks in an organization. Business is basically an activity of buying and selling goods and services. Overall, when making business the interchange of something of one side and another (company, person, group) is happening. Most of the time goods or services in exchange of money, some other times the exchange could be goods for goods, services for services, or goods for services. Ultimately, both sides earn something when the exchange is completed. Communication is the way to transmit messages among people or organizations. Messages among senders and receivers take place using a medium such as email, phone or just a verbal conversation. Communication is simply an exchange of information but should behave carefully. Facts like expressions, gestures, voice tone and postures might have a big influence on the way sides communicate. The information is transmitted, but if not careful it could flip the main purpose of the initial communication. Therefore, when a communication is being taken place, both sides should be careful with those details, especially when making business.

When communication is taking for business three main things that people should be aware of are: what you want to talk about going to be painful and how long it will take? When you are done talking, what you want from him or her? Without knowing these three things up front should the communication be avoided by looking for excuses, and this is particularly applicable when making business by phone, personal, and also within the coworkers. This signifies that the strict relationships between business and communication need to be deal with careful.

Among many key success factors to the business communication is culture, in particular when making business internationally or a multinational company that deals with employees from different countries. Intercultural communication is the presence of at least two individuals who are culturally different from each other on such important attribute as their value orientation, preferred communication codes, role expectations, and perceived rules of social relationship (Moran, Abramson, and Moran, 2014). Literature indicated that there are gaps that business communication could have when there is not a clear understanding of the culture of a foreign country (Yoshida, Yashiro, and Suzuki, 2013). An emphasis was placed that “…the participants felt that intercultural communication training was necessary for everyone…people in the personnel department and

those in the overseas department need it the most…” (Yoshida, Yashiro, and Suzuki, 2013, p.74).

In this article, moreover, one of the cases was that a Japanese arriving to a Middles East country and they set up a pick-up time, the next day the Middle East person did not show up and the Japanese was very upset. When he asked the person from Middle East what was happening and this one answered “sorry, after I told you the pick-up time to go to the meeting, I promised someone else to meet up”. Apparently, although it may be just a special case, in Middle East the promise is more important than meeting commitments. This story implies that there would be a big impact on the business communication when dealing with business across cultures.

To deepen the concept, Wang, Pauleen, and Zhang (2016, p. 4-14) reported that “… Business communication needs more than text and icons; face to face is needed to avoid misunderstanding … and even more when dealing with different cultures …”. This also implies that some additional cost on some situations is needed; like traveling to other country to concrete an agreement or going headquarters of a company to sign a contract. But when having a business communication on an international working environment it is really important having prior knowledge and understanding of the other cultures to have a better integration between the employees or customers from different countries. Usually, when dealing with a formal business communication among multiple cultures, one of the ultimate goals is to reach a correct decision, tangible or intangible. For example, when conducting a price negotiation for a business deal the measures of success or not success for the business communication would be whether efficient to reach the goal, whether a good price for the seller, and whether a commitment is made by the buyer.

Accordingly, decision outcomes are important when business communication is concerned.

2.2 Decision outcomes

According to the adaptive structuration theory (Desanctis and Poole, 1994), the decision outcomes are described by commitment, quality, consensus, and efficiency; in other words, whether a decision is successful or not is whether the decision reaches to a satisfactory commitment, efficiency, quality, and consensus. The commitment is something like a promise; it is a legal binding exchange of agreements thru a contract, or a firm decision to do something.

Overall, commitment is to accomplish something of mutual interests. Commitment has an effect on the business deal. De Lemos and Hadjikhani (2014, p. 333 stated that “… the firms do not avoid risk, but rather they manage risk by balancing the levels of commitment…”. This implies that

managers need to be really careful when assigning task to the employees. It is also important to know how committed to the decisions of the managers are the employee, because for the company this commitment to the decision can make the difference between a successful project or a failure.

This is like a snowball effect; when the commitment that the board of directors has to the decisions, this commitment feeling will be transmitted to the CEO, managers, supervisors and so on, and will be very much likely influence the conversation while dealing a business with customers. Its important to motivate the highest rank on the management of a company, an effective a common way to do is, according to some other research, set between 10-20 percent of the company equity, to those who play an important role on the company. This signifies that employees at any level have the feeling of belonging to something on any case will likely increase the commitment to the decisions.

De Lemos and Hadjikhani (2014, p. 334) placed an emphasis on that “…Detrimental situations trigger the problem of insufficient commitment or knowledge and urge the firms to make decisions in order to encounter acceptable or tolerable the level of risk in their foreign operations”.

When there is not enough commitment on a decision to take the right risk, then firms will be also facing a problem that should concern everybody on the working environment. A high level of commitment on a decision implies a feeling of belonging. This gives an important role to know the commitment of an employee to reflect whether a decision is satisfied.

It is generally believed that quality is measured by the degree of meeting the need or expectations of a customer; a more general definition is the standard of something as a measure of other things of a similar kind, or degree of excellence of something. The quality is strongly related to the perception that someone can give in one culture compare to someone from a different culture.

Whenever working with people from different nationalities or customers from other countries it is needed to set the standard of work or product in order to work on the same level of excellence.

One of the reasons that decision quality is important is because customers who make a good choice is likely to be happy, satisfied, and more likely to return and repurchase (Aksoy, Cooil, and Lurie, 2011).

Mostly, when making a good quality decision the satisfaction that this decision generates might also influence on the productivity of the employee. If a manager takes the decision of promoting someone under the standard of the company which are likely high quality standards in order to be promoted, normally this decision brings a satisfaction on waterfall effect, starting from

the directions to the most basic positions, because this promotion have an effect on a good way of the productivity or service of the company. If narrowing more the concept of decision quality in the organization, it pertains to whether decisions are made based on valid assumptions and the best available information, and weather the solutions that are generated fit the organization strategies and contribute to its overall effectiveness (Cameli and Schaubroeck, 2006). When decision quality is considered as an important factor in the organization the overall effectiveness of the company tends to increase, and as every business manager is looking for cost down and profit increase, the effectiveness might be a priority. We view decision quality as an outcome of leadership and team characteristic, as mediated by the dynamics among team members (Lin and Rababah, 2014).

It is important to have a decision quality standard and have these standards clear to the directors of the company. Moreover, when a multinational company needs to deal with different cultures on managing positions, it is also good to understand the perception that each culture gives to decision quality. For a manager on X country decision quality might be the fast one and cheapest, however, on Y country decision quality is the one that takes time to make and requires many sections of consultations. This signifies that it is important when dealing with employees, or managers from different cultures to have clear definition and understanding of decision quality in order to work smoothly and effectively. Hence, the current research thesis considers quality as one of the decision outcomes toward business communication success.

Consensus generally refers to the accepted opinion or decision among a group of people, general agreement or concord. it plays an important role in any organization, particularly when dealing with people from different countries; and usually it tends to be hard to get a consensus due to the cultural differences. The performance of a group consensus decisions is measured in terms of group fallibility and the time needed to reach a consensus (Fumas, Royo, and Rojo, 2016). The main issue of reaching a consensus is good. In other words, how good can a group agree with a common decision represents a part of how good the decision outcome is. There are generally many factors that are associated with the answers. The main one that the research thesis considers is the consequence of social interaction.

Consensus varies in an economically significant way across communication networks due to cultural difference (Fumas, Royo, and Rojo, 2016). The different way of thinking is an important variable when being on a multinational working environment regarding to decision consensus. On a case of a local company on X country to get a consensus about a decision to make sometimes

takes time, even though all the people /employees are from the same country. What more will take when having people from different countries and different way of thinking. It’s important to take in consideration the importance of decision consensus because the amount of big companies that deal with employees from different countries is massive and its increasing, situation that is happening between Taiwan and Dominican Republic. This factor is considered as one of the decision outcome success.

Decision efficiency refers to how fast a decision is reached. Empirical evidence shows that one-way firms (both private and state) can improve efficiency is through multinational operations (Ohene-Asere, Turkson, and Dadzie, 2017). Practically, when a firm goes abroad to expand is to generate assets in more than one country. In this case, the impact of culture on decision efficiency is generally important when talking about the influence of social interactions over decision outcomes. International diversification or multinational operations is expected to increase a firm’s efficiency and profitability because it can result on economy of scale and provide better and flexible access to resources and allow for more learning (Ohene-Asere, Turkson, and Dadzie, 2017). When a firm deal with different cultures it is not just the employee to get a salary from it, also the firm can absorb and acquire knowledge from the perspective of another culture when making decision efficiency.

Overall, commitment, quality, consensus, and efficiency are considered in the research thesis as the measure dimensions of decision outcomes conducive to business communication success.

However, what even more important is the antecedents that are associated with these dimensions.

Among factors is the social interaction that is taking place in the decision process among multiple cultures for the multinational companies when making businesses.

2.3 Social Interaction

According to the adaptive structuration theory (Desanctis and Poole, 1994), the decision process embedded in the social interaction has six dimensions; they are conflict management, task management, behavior influence, idea generation, enhancement of participation willingness and uncertainty removal. Generally, there are various behaviors in the social interaction which is very likely related to these dimensions. Social interaction is the process by which group members act and react to those around (Goffman, 1983), which in turn will likely influence decision outcomes.

Accordingly, the first proposition is defined as follows.

Proposition 1: Social interaction is related to decision outcomes in business communication P1-1: Social interaction is related to decision efficiency

P1-2: Social interaction is related to decision quality P1-3: Social interaction is related to decision consensus P1-4: Social interaction is related to decision commitment

First, the task management is a way of describing how someone identifies, monitors and progresses the work needed to do on a certain period of time. The task may involve planning, testing, fallowing up and reporting. Task management simplifies works, helps individuals or group to reach in an efficient way the goals that are set in organization or any group with a common objective. However, the cultural differences from any employee might have some effects on the way they handle the task management. For example, in Taiwanese culture when a manager or superior gives an order to reach a goal that is set on a company normally the employee of lower position will just follow the instructions and will not share a possible better idea that he or she could have. This is just a cultural manner. On the other hand, if a Dominican manager gives some orders to reach any task if a lower position employee has an idea that he or she considers better this employee somehow will find the way to share it to the manager or do it thru a supervisor; but somehow will let this idea go to a higher position employee. The same thing happens on a Taiwanese classroom, students tend to not share their personal opinion with the professors, something totally different with Dominican students. This implies that one way or another the cultural differences will likely have influences on the task management, which is a challenge for working in the multiple cultural environments to reach a successful decision outcome.

Second, behavior influence is obvious in social interaction. One of personal experiences as a worker in Taiwan is when arriving Taiwan as a student the first time to study Chinese the cultural difference was very much chocking. After going back to Dominican Republic and come back to Taiwan I got the opportunity to work with Taiwanese people. In Dominican Republic, it is really a competitive environment; particularly, when it is about work people are like to express ideas to superior in order to catch their attention and be promoted and so on. When start working with Taiwanese I saw a very noble environment where people do not have to talk even if they are asked for opinion, and environment that confuses me between fear and respect toward the supervisors, management position people. It was very hard for me to see some actions and decisions that where

being taking within the department I work. Also, Taiwanese employees shared with me their opinions about what was happening, but nobody was dare to share their own opinions or to give suggestions (on most of the cases not all of them). I was forced to adapt myself to this situation and to this behavior; and their behavior really influences on mine in the working environment. For several weeks, I felt that I was hand tight with no right of opinion until I could not stand it more.

I start to talk to some of my coworkers and get to somehow influence them to be a little bit more open. It was me to make that happen who took the first step and decided to share opinions with the superior for some situations that where happening on the department. Luckily, I was listened and my opinion was considered, but in the end was not put in action. After this, my coworkers saw that nothing extraordinary or wrong happened, instead the environment starts to feel looser on the department and I did not change their behavior but I did influence on it, because they start to be more open to share their opinions. So, the behavior influence according to my personal experiences is a social interaction that might affect the decision outcome.

Third, conflict management is viewed as a part of a larger process of ensuring that group members live in peace and in an orderly way. It should also be channeled toward positive effect in every human community (Agbu and Remi, 2006). Conflict management is basically how people deal with issues/problems on a certain environment looking to keep the order. Knowing that Dominican Republic and Taiwan are totally different on behavior, culture, and overall, the research

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