中国员工和美国员工的直接冲突和间接冲突【外文翻译】

外文翻译

原文

Direct And Indirect Conflicts At Work In China And The US: ACross-cultural

Comparison

Material Source:Work and stress Author:Cong Li Abstract: Most studies on interpersonal conflict at work have been conducted in Western countries. However, cultural differences may affect how people behave towards each other. Using the Cross-Cultural Interpersonal Conflict Scale (CC-ICS) developed for this research, we assessed both direct (face-to-face) and indirect (negative behaviour behind someone’s back) conflict at work in 166 and 204 university employees from China and the United States (US), respectively. Direct conflict played a more important role in predicting US employees’ psychological strains, whereas indirect conflict played a more important role in predicting Chinese employees’ physical symptoms. Thus, employees’ cultural backgrounds appear to be associated with how they express conflict behaviours.

Keywords: interpersonal conflict; job stress; cross-cultural comparison; China An important job stressor: interpersonal conflict at work.According to the Process Model of Conflict (Thomas, 1992), conflict starts when one person perceives that another has negatively affected, or is about to negatively affect, something the first person cares about. Second, these perceptions are accompanied by thoughts (cognitions that help people to make sense of the event) and emotions (affect). Third, the individual’s intentions (or motives) about how to handle conflicts are formed. Finally, the behaviours result in different outcomes, which may be either functional or dysfunctional (e.g., Robbins, 2005).Functional conflicts include task conflicts which relate to content and goals of the work, such as distribution of resources, rules and politics, and decision making, whereas dysfunctional conflicts include relationship conflicts that are about personal tastes, preferences, and interpersonal style (De Dreu & Van Vianen, 2001). Thus, interpersonal conflict refers to a process that includes cognitive, affective, motivational, as well as behavioural stages.Conflict behaviours can also have different forms of expression. There are direct behaviours in which individuals may

argue, be outwardly rude, or shout at one another. Indirect behaviours affect the individual, but take place where they cannot be observed, such as doing mean things behind another’s back, making negative comments about one employee to another, or undermining. Differentiation of direct and indirect conflict becomes very important in cross-cultural contexts as there can be cultural differences in how people behave toward one another (Liu et al., 2007). Since interpersonal conflicts are unavoidable in social settings, the overall amount of conflict may be comparable across cultures. However, when we look at direct and indirect conflicts separately, cultural differences may well emerge

Conflict differences between China and the US

Although they might experience similar overall levels of conflict, US and Chinese employees may engage in different conflict behaviours, and the impact of experiencing conflict might differ as well (Liu et al., 2007). There are three cultural differences between China and the US that would be expected to influence conflict behaviours.

First, compared to those in the US, Chinese people tend to be collectivistic (Hofstede, 2001), which means they tend to view themselves interms of social connections. Collectivists place more value on group harmony, interdependence and concern for others than do individualists (Landrine, 1995;Marsella, DeVos, & Hsu, 1985).This emphasis on harmony should result in a climate in which direct and open conflict is seen as unacceptable as it represents a threat to the maintenance of group harmony. Those from individualistic cultures tend to use explicit and direct verbal conversation and conflict, whereas collectivists tend to avoid direct conflict and unpleasant interpersonal situations to protect group harmony (Leung, 1988; Ting-Toomey, 1985).

Second, social connections (Guanxi) are deeply rooted in Chinese culture and are

considered one of the most important cultural traits (Ulijn, Rutkowski, Kumar, & Zhu,2005). It is necessary for a Chinese employee to cultivate his or her relationships with all people at work (including supervisors, co-workers, and subordinates) in order to have a good standing in the workplace. These differences between prototypically individualistic cultures like that of the US and prototypically collectivistic cultures like that of China lead to different expectations regarding the form of interpersonal conflict expressed among employees in China and the U.S.

Direct and indirect conflicts in China

The function of indirect conflict on Chinese employees’ psychological and physical health deserves a further look. Compared to direct conflict, indirect conflict engaged in by another person at work appears to be a more important factor for Chinese employees’ psychological and physical health. However, the magnitudes of these associations were consistently larger for indirect conflict. For example, indirect conflict was more strongly related to anger, sadness, and anxiety than was direct conflict for Chinese employees, respectively, indicating that indirect conflict by other people at work is more harmful than direct conflict for Chinese employees’ psychological health. One possible reason is that direct conflicts in China are at a surface level. They are small conflicts and easy to fix. However, indirect conflicts are more intense and harmful to Chinese. In the US, direct and indirect conflict had similar relations to job strains. Future study should look at the frequency and intensity of interpersonal conflicts at both surface and underlying levels in order to better understand the impact of culture on employees’ conflict behaviours. Limitations, implications, and future research

There are some limitations of this study that should be kept in mind when interpreting results. First, we collected data from university employees. Second, cultural differences such as individualism collectivism, face saving, forbearance, and social connections (guanxi) were assumed to account for differences between our US and Chinese samples but were not assessed directly. Although the US and China have been considered prototypes of individualistic and collectivistic nations, respectively (Hofstede, 1984), there might be some overlap between the Chinese and US samples in terms of collectivistic or individualistic orientations. It will be helpful in future studies to directly measure cultural values to see if individual differences within countries impact the level of conflict as well as relationships with strain. Finally, two sets of items were developed to measure indirect conflict.Concluding remarks Despite the limitations, we believe that this study makes a unique contribution to the cross cultural job stress literature. Based on our results, we conclude that interpersonal conflict is an important factor in employees’ mental and physical health in both China and the US. Therefore, it is critical to study interpersonal conflicts in cross-cultural settings, with the ultimate goal of improving employees’ occupational health in a diversified workplace.

Second, although workplace conflicts have been studied for years, there are different ways to conceptualize conflicts. One way that has been understudied is to differentiate the forms of conflict behaviour expressions. In this study, we defined

direct conflict and indirect conflict.Such a conceptualization is particularly important in cross-cultural settings.

Third, direct and indirect conflict may influence employees’ mental and physical health in different ways. For example, we found that direct conflicts were less harmful for Chinese employees than for US employees. We suspect that the direct conflicts in China are less intense and less serious than those in the US, but our data do not allow us to examine this possibility because our measure assesses frequency and not severity of conflict. Future research examining the intensity of conflicts in the workplace across countries would be useful. Compared to direct conflict, indirect conflicts had stronger associations with both psychological and physical strains. The function of indirect conflicts deserves further research, especially in the Chinese workplace.

译文

中国员工和美国员工的直接冲突和间接冲突

资料来源: 工作与压力 作者：从丽 摘要：在西方国家许多有关于工作上的人际冲突的研究已经产生了。然而，文化的差异可能会影响人们彼此之间的行为。关于这次研究，我们将开发并使用跨文化的人际冲突量表，主要评估中国的166位大学雇员和来自于美国的204位雇员在工作上产生的直接冲突和间接冲突。在预测美国员工的心理压力方面，直接冲突扮演着一个非常重要的角色，然而在预测中国员工的身体状况方面，间接冲突扮演着一个非常重要的角色。因此，员工的文化背景与他们如何表达冲突的行为是联系在一起的。

关键词：人际冲突；工作压力；跨文化比较；中国 一项重要的工作压力：工作中的人际冲突

通过这个冲突过程模型(Thomas, 1992)，可以发现当一个人觉察到他对另一个人产生了负面影响或者即将产生负面影响的时候，冲突开始了，这些都是人第一个关心的问题。其实，这些看法都伴随着思想（能帮助人们做有意义的事的想法）和情感（有影响力）。第三，这个个人的意图是怎么样去处理已经形成的冲突。最后，这些行为可能导致不同的结果，可能是功能性或者精神失常（例如，罗宾斯，2005）。功能性的冲突包括有关于目录和工作目标的任务冲突，例如资源、规则和政策的分布，然而功能失调的冲突主要是有关于个人

口味、喜好和人际风格的关系冲突（De Dreu & Van Vianen, 2001) ，因此，人际冲突是指一个过程，包括认知，情感，动机，以及行为阶段。

冲突行为也可能有不同的表现形式。一些直接的行为比如说是个体的争论、粗鲁的言行、互相唾骂。间接地行为也在影响着他们，但是是发生在他们不能直接观察到的地方。例如，在别人背后做小动作，使一个员工对另一个员工做出负面评论或者破坏。直接冲突和间接冲突的分化在跨文化背景下非常重要，可以看出人们是如何对待彼此的文化差异。由于在社会环境中人际冲突是不可避免的，所以大体上的冲突就是跨文化的比较而产生的。然而，当我们发现直接冲突和间接冲突相分离的时候，文化差异可能就出现了。

中国和美国之间的分歧冲突

虽然，他们可能会遇到类似的冲突，但是中国员工和美国员工可能进行的是不同的冲突行为，并且冲突所产生的影响也不同。在中国和美国之间存在着三种文化差异，将预期影响到冲突行为。

第一，与美国人相比较，中国人民往往坚持的是集体主义，这样才能使他们认为自己是在这个社会关系中的。集体主义在团队和谐，互相依赖和对他人的关心上都比个人主义更有价值意义。这种对于和谐的强调会导致一种倾向，就是直接和开放性的冲突看上去是不能被接受的，因为它的出现对于和谐团队的存在是一个威胁。那些来自于个人文化的人倾向于用明确和直接的口头对话和冲突，那些集体主义者为了保护团队和谐倾向于避免直接冲突和不愉快的人际交往。

第二，社会文化是深深根植于中国文化的，被认为是最重要的文化特征之一。为了有一个良好的工作环境，一个中国员工去培养自己与所有人（包括主管、同事和下属）的关系这都是必须的。

这个像美国的个人主义文化原型和表现在中国员工和美国员工的人际冲突的形式的集体主义文化原型之间是有很多不同点的。

在中国的直接冲突和间接冲突

关于中国员工的心理和身体健康的间接冲突的作用值得进一步研究。与直接冲突相比较，间接冲突参与到另一个人的工作当中表现的比中国员工的心理和身体健康更加有意义。然而，这些巨大的结合是由一些大的间接冲突组成的。例如，对于中国员工来讲，间接冲突导致的生气、难过、和忧虑比直接冲突更加强烈，对于中国员工的身体健康来说，在工作中其他人的间接冲突比直接冲突更加有伤害性。一个原因是，中国的直接冲突仍停留在表面水平。他们是小的冲突并且很容易解决。然而，对于中国人来讲，间接冲突更加强烈和有伤害性。在美国，对于工作直接冲突和间接冲突是相关联的。为了理解关于雇员冲突行为产生的文化的影响，未来的研究应该关注在表面的和深层次水平的一些