In many cross-cultural meetings, cultural diversity and the clash of views about procedures and methods to be adopted lead to slow progress; and major disagreements and communication problems sometimes emerge.

As strong disagreement about the decision-making procedures that should be used occurs in many cross-cultural meetings, it was no surprise when incompatible approaches to decision-making emerged as a key issue after a British firm acquired a German engineering company.

The new owners asked the German management to develop a new strategic plan and to give this task top priority. However, the Germans were slow to take the numerous decisions needed on production and manpower levels, capital spending plans and so on.

One reason for the Germans’ reluctance was that they were used to making decisions from clear-cut performance targets. But when the Germans asked the new owners to provide targets the Brits responded by advising the Germans to collect their own data and develop their own targets.

A meeting of British and German managers was called to resolve the problem.

During the meeting the British team said they could not understand why the Germans wanted all those numbers because what was needed was fast decisions. But the German team countered by saying that what was needed was reliable decisions.