Taiwan A Collectivist Culture

The eastern countries tend to be more collectivist and co-operative compared to the Western which are more individual and competitive. The individualistic and collectivist levels of culture reflect the different societies’ attitudes towards the way of working. According to Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland, “collectivism society should have an advantage in coordinating production processes and in various forms of collective action.” (n.d.). Everyone must take others into consideration in collective society, and the members of the organization have spiritual obligations and loyalty to the organization. Taiwan is a collectivist tendency country. Managers in enterprise often encourage employees to actively take part in the decision-making

In Taiwan, enterprise tend to put employees into groups, but they specialized what they are good for, thus you will have a better chance to be selected if you can cooperate well with others in group. This make Taiwan business very co-operative and collective. In an individualistic society, people are concerned with pursuing their goals and are not preoccupied with group welfare. According to Markus and Kitayama, “they seek to maintain they’re independence from others by attending to the self and by discovering and ex pressing their unique at tributes” (1991). In the society of respect for individualism such as the United Kingdom, each person only considers their own interests, everyone is free to choose their own actions. In enterprise, the manager often makes his or her decision independently. The whole enterprise is just like a huge competition in personal unit. Employees may work harder to display their contribution in order to impress their superior for appreciation or reward. This also create the competitive business culture in the Great

According to the model of culture from Hall’s and Hall (1990), as cited in the Browaeys & Price book (Browaeys & Price, 2011, p.148), different regions and culture background tend to have distinct understanding of “time”, which categorized into monochronic and polychronic. polychronic cultures like to do multiple things at the same time. Places in the mid-east and some part of Asia tend to be more polychronic. In Taiwan are more alike to polychronic culture. We have a 15 minutes tolerance of time of being “punctual”. We do not criticize people of not being right “on time” in most occasions, wedding for instance, guests are expected to be have an hour late or more to attend. While doing businesses, Taiwanese employees are trained to multi-tasking, dealing with more than one tasks at a time, we have a flexibility control of time. The lunch break could be longer if employees are having discussions about work. Building a long-term relationship is considered more important than finish the tasks on time. The spending of time in building up good relationship made Taiwan a high-context country. As a high context culture, Taiwanese people pay a lot of attention to the context surrounding spoken words. As the Communicaid web site stated, “each message has a great amount of meaning which is reflected in the constant use of indirect communication (Taiwan