Intercultural Awareness: Cultural and Relational Effects on Awareness Information Gathering Behavior

Bi, Nanyi; Birnholtz, Jeremy; Fussell, Susan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47310 Copy

Description

Title

Intercultural Awareness: Cultural and Relational Effects on Awareness Information Gathering Behavior

Author(s)

• Bi, Nanyi
• Birnholtz, Jeremy
• Fussell, Susan

Issue Date

2014-03-01

Keyword(s)

• awareness information
• intercultural
• familiarity
• collaboration.

Abstract

Awareness information, information about others' presence and activities that allows us to determine their availability for conversation, plays an important role in workplace communication, as people often gather and act on it in the process of negotiating mutual availability. This paper presents a laboratory experiment examining how gathering awareness information is affected by the cultural backgrounds and mutual familiarity of collaborators. Results suggest that members of cultures considered more relationship-oriented (e.g., China) gathered awareness information less frequently than members of cultures that are more task-oriented (e.g., the United States). We argue that this is because of the different motivations for interaction prioritized by these cultures. We did not find any effect for familiarity, but provide several alternative explanations for this result.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2014 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

english

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/47310

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/14122

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 is held by the authors of individual items in the proceedings. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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