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Three Thunderbird professors from different academic backgrounds sat around a table Feb. 5 and shared ideas about business survival in a world turned upside. Afterward, the professors invited students in the packed auditorium to join the conversation. “It’s not business as usual,” Thunderbird Professor Karen Walch, Ph.D., told the students. “We wanted to start a dialogue, and we wanted to invite you to participate with us.”
Walch teaches cross-cultural negotiation at the Garvin Center for Cultures and Languages of International Management. She was joined by Professor Christine Pearson, Ph.D., who studies corporate crisis management and workplace incivility, and Professor Roe Goddard, Ph.D., who studies international political economy and Chinese market trends.
The professors opened the roundtable discussion with introductions of their own research and experiences. Following are excerpts from those presentations.
Beware of protectionism as Asia falters
By Roe Goddard, Ph.D.
The world has gone somewhat awry. It’s off kilter. For awhile, many thought Asia would survive the crisis. That has now been debunked, as growth subsides throughout the region — particularly in Japan and the emerging markets, including India.
Hope that China’s burgeoning demand would lift us out of the recession has failed. As of this week, there are now 20 million unemployed factory workers in China.
Optimistic scenarios showed China growing 7 percent in 2009. Sinologists now say China will struggle to maintain absolute minimum levels of growth, which are necessary to prevent massive social unrest and street riots. Tiananmen Square in 1989 is often confused. It was not about Western notions such as freedom of the press and speech. It was about inflation, declining economic conditions and job insecurity.
The Communist party in China trembles at every updated unemployment report. U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to compensate for job losses in the United States could further undermine Chinese exports and inflate the ranks of the unemployed even further. Allegations of currency manipulation add another layer to the challenges.
China is under attack, it seems, both within and without.
Income inequality resentments run deep in the world, not just in China. As a political economist, oil price volatility scares me more than paying $4 a gallon at the local gas pump.
Protectionism as a knee-jerk reaction to economic malaise has already returned, and it’s rampant. The Congressionally supported Buy America campaign, political alliances with labor organizations, campaign promises and anti-NAFTA campaigns all bode poorly for free trade.
Add to this, the bankers don’t get it. There’s something fundamentally perverse in the moral compass of America.
If you don’t pay your taxes or you receive obscene bonuses, someone else — a fellow human being — ultimately will pay for it. There just ain’t no free lunch, to quote Ronald Reagan from times past. We have a closed system.
Comparisons to the Depression era have become commonplace. The 1930s preceding the outbreak of World War II brought nationalism, protectionism and regionalism. It’s a slippery slope from economic nastiness to troop and ship movements.
Regardless, we all want to live to see better days for ourselves, for our families and come out of this prosperous. May you maintain your wits in a world turned upside down.
Forefront of a new frontier
By Karen Walch, Ph.D.
I have confidence and excitement about this forum and the people in this room, and what Thunderbird has done in the past and where we are going in the future.
After World War II, there was uncertainty about where we were going, and the international market was an unknown. Thunderbird was a pioneer in terms of looking at how to do business in this changing international system.
Now we are at the forefront of a new frontier, and that is the exploration of our minds. We have outlasted the theories of political science in terms of using threat strategy. We can kill each other in so many ways that we’ve actually outlived the usefulness of destructive power.
The new frontier is exploring what can we do with our minds. You need to look at your competencies at the intellectual level — including social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.
Those kinds of competencies will make a significant difference in way we educate ourselves, connect with each other and share with each other. We need to work more than ever on our negotiation skills.
Use the energy of anxiety to discipline yourself in your education. Ask questions of others and connect with one another.
Every day I’m getting e-mails from T-birds around the world who are concerned about job security and industry security. They’re finding a need to connect with others.
If you’re feeling vulnerable, increase your leverage on the intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual plane. Keep that circulation moving in terms of serving others and finding ways to get some of your questions heard.
Take a deep breath
By Christine Pearson, Ph.D.
I have two threads of research that I have pursued during my career. The first started more than 20 years ago looking at organizational crisis management. I have worked with Fortune 50 companies and others to help senior executives deal with actual crises, and also to prepare for crises.
The second research thread has been workplace incivility — or rudeness, lack of respect and the little bad behaviors that drive us all crazy and make our days more stressful.
Drawing from crisis management research, here are some of the symptoms that let you know you’re in a stressed out crisis mode:
– Aches and pains.
– Change in sleeping habits.
– Change in eating habits.
– Cognitive impairment, when you can’t think as fast as you normally do.
– Enduring sense of distress, or a sense that you’re avoiding or neglecting problems, like there is always something out there on the horizon that you can’t quite get to or take care of.
– Greater sense of incivility.
So what do you do when you’re feeling these symptoms? Based on my experience with crisis management teams around the world, these are the kinds of things I encourage them to do:
– Maintain healthy sleep levels.
– Increase exercise levels.
– Get more fresh air.
– Cut back on caffeine.
– Cut back on alcohol.
– Take relaxation breaks, which can be as short as 10 or 20 seconds.
– Turn off the television.
– Limit your exposure to the news media.
– Let other people into your life. Talk about your stress.
– Limit your multitasking. Research shows you have higher efficiency if you do one thing at a time.
Drawing on incivility research, the bottom line is that emotional ignorance leads to incivility, incivility leads to stress, and stress leads to workplace inefficiency. The American Institute of Stress Management has estimated that stress costs the United States about $300 billion each year.
Stress is also the highest cause of disability claims, and it’s the fastest rising cause of disability claims in North America and Europe.
If people are uncivil to each other in the workplace, their ideas become less creative, they are less likely to engage in good citizenship behavior — or any tasks that people do to help each other beyond their job description — energy is depleted, performance tanks and they are less satisfied in their jobs.
About half the people on the receiving end of incivility cut back on the amount of time they spend at work, about half cut back on the amount of effort they put in, and three in four lose time worrying about the next act of incivility.
Most everybody also takes some action to get even. So, if you’re on the offensive side, look out. In the end, about 10 percent of people on the receiving end of workplace incivility actually quit their jobs.
An interesting thing to me is that the organization never finds out. Consistently, people will tell their organizations that they are leaving to go to a better job or give some other explanation for their resignation.
If you are the target of incivility, the advice we give after a decade of research — especially if it’s top down — is to back off. That could mean getting off committees or interacting with a person by phone or e-mail instead of face-to-face.
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