Do You 'Friend' Your Boss? Depends Where You Live
Would you send your boss a link, or ask him to friend you? What if you worked in Israel? Or China? A new study is examining the cultural differences in social media use in four countries. Some faculty members at NYIT (New York Institute of Technology) School of Management have won a $100,000 grant to examine how cultural dimensions affect the way people use social media to interact with work colleagues. They will investigate work relationships and social media in four countries: the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), China, Israel, and Canada. The study scores national cultures on six “dimensions," including power distance, which is the cultural acceptance of unequal power relations (high score) versus people who question authority (low); individuality, the value a culture places on either individual preferences (high score) or collective needs (low), and uncertainty avoidance, a cultural value in favor of certainty and a single, shared Truth (high score), as opposed