True Story 4.06
African students lose interest in a British business course
The setting for this story
A group of young African businessmen traveled to a U.K. business school to earn a diploma in financial management by completing a four-week course. Clare was the administrator of the program for the school. She had repeated opportunities to interact with the Africans and recalls how they adjusted over time to their academic program.
A story of misaligned minds7
As administrator, I watched the African students arrive with high expectations, then flounder a little until they got adjusted to the U.K. and our school. Soon, though, they brightened up and seemed focused on their coursework. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long. They increasingly seemed uninvolved, even unresponsive. Their professors noticed this, too, and were really concerned.
Clare’s question
These young African businessmen had been motivated to advance their careers by qualifying for our diploma. They paid lots of money and traveled a long distance to get here. So how come they began to lose interest?
Critique of story 4.06
Throughout these seventy-six stories, the focus is mainly on contrasts in people’s behavior. In this case, the cultural complication probably is due to the course content. Let’s explore this possibility.
When the African students flew north to the U.K., they mentally brought with them, completely intact, their African assumptions about how the world works. In their communitarian societies, individuals are not expected to take initiative or assertively pursue their own interests. As in communitarian societies everywhere, one individual is expected to authoritatively lead each group, build group solidarity, and pursue the group’s interests vis-à-vis other groups. (Examples of such groups include clans, extended families, business organizations, etc.) These assumptions lead group members to prefer to be authoritatively told what is right and wrong so they can fit in and contribute.
At the time the events in this story occurred, the management theories taught in most Western business schools were American in origin, grounded in a belief that the world works due to the initiatives and activities of separate individuals. For example, one focus of management theory was motivation. Everyone’s motive was said to be to advance their own individual interests through climbing the organizational ladder. Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” was popular; its highest need was “self-actualization.” Another characteristic of Western theories was that they admired democratic management. Popular was McGregor’s Theory Y, which advocated that managers encourage employees to contribute to decision-making and take initiative in their assignments. Not desirable was Theory X, which featured top-down directives and tight employee supervision.
As you can see, the African and American understandings of how the world works could hardly contrast more sharply. For the communitarian Africans to spend hours in class day after day listening to respected professors extol the virtues of a relentlessly individualistic approach to business wasn’t just disorienting and dispiriting. The professors’ ideas might even have seemed morally repugnant.
And that’s not all. The Africans were being taught by Western professors who expected students to contribute their own questions and insights to classroom discussions. The Africans had expected an expert who knows what’s best and, in class, authoritatively transmits that knowledge to students. Thus, the Africans very likely regarded their professors as abdicating their responsibility.
For thought
The Africans’ professors needed to do something, fast, to regain their students’ interest and trust. If you were one of those professors, what steps would you recommend that all of you take?
Related stories
Story 7.16 describes the failure of a Western business course in China, but for totally different reasons.
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Endnotes:
7 Johnson, 13–16.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.