Is your business international? Do you have clients, employees, or virtual office workers belonging in different cultures? 

Any workplace needs employees to have good Business Emotional Intelligence; it helps team members understand and manage not only their emotions, but those of their colleagues too. A cross-cultural setting, however, needs it even more, where differences in beliefs and practices often give rise to misunderstandings which may ultimately decrease productivity. 

Business Emotional Intelligence becomes more crucial given the findings of a recent study done on cross-cultural interpretations of facial expressions. Contrary to the long-held belief that emotional expressions and identifications are universal, researcher Rachael Jack and her colleagues have shown that it isn’t so. 

The team worked with Western Caucasian and East Asian participants who looked at dozens of pictures of White and Chinese faces. Based on the emotions shown in each photograph and following the facial action coding system (FACS), the participants were asked to categorize the pictures into six emotional expressions: happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness.  

FACS is a way of interpreting emotions using the facial muscles as a guide. Psychologist and FACS co-creator Paul Ekman contributed to the widely-accepted belief that emotional expressions are universal. 

What Jack and her team found out was that the East Asian participants significantly made errors in identifying fear and disgust, mistaking them for surprise and anger. This difference was explained through the tools tracking the participants’ eye movements: East Asian participants, in the process of categorization, focused only on the eye regions while the Western participants paid as much attention to the nose and mouth regions.

The implication of the study’s findings is clear: in other areas of the world, specifically in East Asia, how people express and identify emotions may differ from other cultures. If you have workers or clients in this part of the globe, therefore, it pays well, to be able to identify, understand, and manage emotions better, something that someone with emotional intelligence can do.

In this increasingly globalized world, borderless marketplaces are becoming the norm, so keep up with the demands of the cross-cultural setting by developing your own and your co-workers’ Business Emotional Intelligence.

Don’t let your team’s productivity suffer through miscommunications brought about by cultural differences. Develop your workers’ Business Emotional Intelligence with the help of the EBW System, so that they can get along well with their co-workers across the ocean in the same way that they do with their on-site teammates. 

To find out how the EBWt Team System can improve performance in international teams click this link  http://www.ebwonline.com/TeamAssessment.aspx

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