Have you ever been abroad and asked for directions? Did the person sometimes give directions that you KNEW were wrong or did they try to give directions eventhough it was evident they knew less than you did? This is because in their culture, it is more important to be...

One of Harvard Business Review’s most popular articles for 2015 was one authored by Erin Meyer, who wrote an interesting piece on the different styles people use when negotiating with a visual that went viral on Twitter. Her work resonates because our world is increasingly connected and, as much...

The column below was first published in De Psycholoog – Dutch magazine for Psychology December 2015 under the title: Niet een of geen maar allemaal. A PDF of the Dutch version can be found here: PSY1512_WisselColumn. You do not come across it often as a specific direction within a...

Every day I’m thankful where I was born and where I live now, especially when winter is kicking in. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/refugees-horror-calais-jungle-refugee-camp-feel-like-dying-slowly “Jennifer Wilson, a teacher from Harare who has been volunteering for more than a month, is sorting through the clothes, discarding useless fake fox scarves and ripped, dirty castoffs....

Recall the fires on gender and race that were flaring up? In response to Tim Hunt’s dinosaur joke on women in labs and falling in love and crying, another scientist had put up an image of a tree house with ‘no girls allowed’ – which reminded me of the...

The recent UK election results made me decide to sit on the fence before any comments are made on what lies ahead. I am concerned about a BREXIT and the Human Rights Act. I worry about zero-hour contracts and wonder how we can support small/medium business entrepreneurs in the...

When I travel on the London underground and take an escalator up or down, I watch the faces of the people across going into the opposite direction. Usually, these faces are expressionless, on their way to something that will require some engagement but for now, on this metal vertical...

Cross cultural management is the ability to handle issues between people from different backgrounds effectively. In our current globalised environment, any individual with responsibility over or for others, i.e., a leader and decision maker, would do well to take heed of the cultural differences that exist but it can...

For James Foley from an Iraqi poet I dreamed that Iraq was a sea. Her wars high waves, her sorrow dark sand, the blood a distant sunset. I dreamed that the Sunnis of Iraq were sharks, the Kurds starfish, the Christians dolphins, the Yezidi goldfish, the Shiites octopuses and...

How the universal need for certainty in nations under socio-economic stress can be satisfied by greater formalization within organizations. Addressing debates about a) the negative correlations between cultural values and practices and b) the controversial effect of formalization and bureaucracy on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), we developed a cross-level...