Elena Karahanna knows—both from her research and from personal experience—that cultural differences can be as much or more of a barrier to conducting business internationally as thousands of miles of geographic distance.

Elena Karahanna often uses case studies to analyze where an executive or project team leader runs into trouble due to a failure to recognize cultural differences. (Photo by Peter Frey)

“I’ve always been intrigued by how cultural differences affect how we see things and how we behave,” says Karahanna, who came from Cyprus to the U.S. to attend college at age 18.

Now as a professor in the Department of Management Information Systems at the Terry College of Business, cross-cultural communication is an underlying aspect of her many research interests, whether it’s new technology adoption, the roles of chief information officers in companies or the effectiveness of different types of communications media. For example, Karahanna recently conducted a study to determine how cultural differences affect choices of communications media and how choosing the wrong media can impact the effectiveness of employees working together across international boundaries.

Worldwide corporations have the tools—fax, e-mail, instant messaging, video computer conferencing—to assemble employees from physical offices around the world into project teams, setting up virtual workplaces in cyberspace where team members interact almost as if they were in an actual office together. What managers of these new virtual offices find out, however, is different cultures respond in different ways to communications depending on the methods used.

Karahanna says e-mail is one such example, coming to the recipient without the context provided by facial expressions, body language or tone of voice. Some cultures are not bothered by that lack of context, she says, but others might find it unsettling, inappropriate or rude. This tendency toward “uncertainty avoidance” migh

t be avoided through the use of richer media to communicate, like telephone conversations, videoconferencing or face-to-face meetings, says Karahanna.

She shares some of these experiences and insights with students in Terry’s graduate and undergraduate level international business courses, often using case studies to analyze where an executive or project team leader runs into trouble due to a failure to recognize cultural differences.

Karahanna says students are intrigued with cultural differences and how they can affect businesses and usually have no trouble identifying where a manager in a given exercise went wrong, but when asked how they would resolve the same problem, they run into the same roadblocks.

“They come up with great solutions that would work in the U.S.,” she says. “Their solutions are based on what they believe will work coming from their own perspectives and cultural experiences. Assuming the native role and understanding the different value systems and how they drive behavior is not as easy to do. It’s an eye opener for them and a nice segue into appreciating the difficulties of cross cultural management.”