Culture Savvy: Working and Collaborating Across the Globe

Chapter 4

Recognition Across Cultures

Today, many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.

—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Clues to the meaning of recognition in the context of the cross-cultural workplace can be found in this word’s etymology. In its basic form, “recognize,” it originally meant “resume possession of land,” from the Middle French ...