Understanding Culture

Culture is a collection of mindsets, standards or models that tell us who we are and how we should behave. For each area of our lives our culture provides “a set of rules and regulations” that:

• Define boundaries
• Says what we must do to succeed within those boundaries.

Success is measured by the problems you solve using these rules and regulations. Our culture shapes our world and our world shapes our culture. Practically speaking, culture makes the world we live and work in our reality.

Culture acts as a filter. What may be perfectly obvious to persons with one paradigm may be quite invisible to persons with a different paradigm. Our ethnocentrism naively assumes that others are just like us, or should be, or at least they should understand our position. If not, they have a problem, they are to be blamed.

Cultural Programming

Where did you learn your values, beliefs, attitudes and patterns of thinking and acting? Each of us is born into a culture. Our beliefs begin with those of our family, but they continue to be shaped by all of our experiences after birth. For the most part, family attitudes, beliefs, languages and other behaviours are accepted without question.

Cultural Filters

Because we are different, we see and interpret behaviour through our cultural filter. One effect of cultural programming is that it puts us “on automatic”. When we were children learning about the world, some of the messages we received about people who are different from us were misinformation. Some of these messages came from our parents, friends, teachers and others.

These people did not intend to feed us misinformation. They were simply passing on the messages that had been passed down to them. Some of the messages we received came from people. Some came from media, such as television and textbooks and newspapers.

Cultural filters come in three forms:

Stereotype: Some of the misinformation constituted stereotypes. These stereotypes became mental tapes that affected what we thought and how we felt about people who were different from ourselves. Those tapes also affected how we responded to people who were different from us. The responses came automatically.

Stereotype is a mental process/thought that all of a certain type people are the same in some behaviour. Often, stereotypes are misconceptions that has not been properly thought through or investigated. In other words, they are not necessarily truths.

Click here to view a video that demonstrate stereotyping.

Prejudice: Prejudice is a judgement or a belief about a group that is often not true. As stereotypes, they are more often than not based on assumptions that have not been researched.

Click here to view an explanation of prejudice.

Discrimination: Discrimination is the action we take because of our stereotypes and or prejudice. Because stereotypes and prejudice are mostly based on untruths, the discrimination based on them is often unfair and ungrounded.

Click here to view an explanation on discrimination.

The workforce is changing and becoming more diverse. With this change, managers in organisations have had to address issues about employee attitudes on diversity issues such as race, religion, sexual orientation and age.