Nonverbal Status Indicators are an important part of communication because they help convey that interpreted differently may not be expressed verbally. However, these indicators are interpreted in different ways across cultures. As a result, one needs to be careful because he or she may communicate something negative unknowingly. One of the most important nonverbal status indicators is the schedule.
Different cultures take schedule seriously, while others are a bit more relaxed and flexible. According to Molinsky (2015), Italians are not sticklers to time. They are regularly late for meetings instead of Americans, who are a bit stricter on a schedule. People from a cultural background who value time will find it frustrating to work with others who feel flexible and not strict on timing. As Molinsky (2015) states, an American manager working with an Italian executive was frustrated because he always had to pad his schedule and add an hour into his schedule to cater to his colleague's lateness, which affected his other engagements.
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As Tran, Admiraal, and Saab (2017) further observe, the view of time is even more different when considering the western and eastern cultures. Like the Chinese, people from the Confucian cultural background incline the past in terms of how they view time and timeliness. They approach more flexible and not strict. They take time when making decisions, so they may be late for meetings requiring some resolutions to be made. They also take time to think and would like not to be put under pressure in that regard. Western culture is different. Everything is done on time and deadlines, and meeting schedules are considered serious and strict (Tran et al., 2017). They look at time as a factor of production that should be utilized with efficiency to achieve organizational goals. As an individual from the eastern culture, a flexible approach to timing and scheduling may be interpreted as laziness by others.
References
Molinsky, A. (2015, April 14). When Cultural Differences Interfere with Your Time . Retrieved September 17, 2020, from Havard Business Review : https://hbr.org/2015/04/when-cultural-differences-interfere-with-your-time
Tran, T. T. Q., Admiraal, W. F., & Saab, N. (2017). Cultural distance in the workplace: Differences in work-related attitudes between Vietnamese employees and Western employers. International Journal of Business and Management , 12 (10), 91-110.
