By William W. Maddux, an associate professor at Insead, Peter H. Kim, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, Tetsushi Okumura, a professor at Nagoya City University, and Jeanne M. Brett, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management
Even after decades of cooperation in business and politics, America and Japan still trip over a seemingly simple concept: the apology. Neither culture appears to fully understand what the other means or expects. For instance, most Americans were unmoved by Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s effusive apologies in 2010, after widespread reports of malfunctioning Prius accelerators. Japan, for its part, bristled when a U.S. submarine commander didn’t immediately apologize after colliding with and sinking a Japanese fishing boat off Hawaii in 2001.
The confusion over the meaning of and occasion for “I’m sorry” extends beyond those countries; indeed, it seems that virtually every culture has its own rules. In India, other researchers have noted, apologies are far less common than in Japan. In Hong Kong they are so prevalent and ritualized that many people are inured to them.
Our own work found that a core issue is differing perceptions of culpability: Americans see an apology as an admission of wrongdoing, whereas Japanese see it as an expression of eagerness to repair a damaged relationship, with no culpability necessarily implied. And this difference, we discovered, affects how much traction an apology gains.
In an initial survey of U.S. and Japanese undergraduates, the U.S. students were more likely to say that an apology directly implied guilt. The Japanese students were more likely to apologize even when they weren’t personally responsible for what had happened. Perhaps for this reason, they apologized a lot more—they recalled issuing an average of 11.05 apologies in the previous week, whereas U.S. students recalled just 4.51.
In a second study, we looked at the utility of apologies for repairing trust. We asked undergraduates from both countries to imagine that they were managers and showed them a video in which an applicant for an accounting job apologized for having deliberately filed an incorrect tax return for a prior client. The Japanese students were more willing than their U.S. counterparts to trust the candidate’s assertion that she wouldn’t engage in such behavior again and to offer her a job. We believe that this is owing to Americans’ inclination to associate apologies with culpability.
The finding that Americans link apologies with blame is in keeping, we’d argue, with a psychological tendency among Westerners to attribute events to individuals’ actions. Thus it makes sense that in the U.S., an apology is taken to mean “I am the one who is responsible.” It also stands to reason that in Japan—which, like many other East Asian countries, has a more group-oriented culture—apologies are heard as “It is unfortunate that this happened.” Researchers who’ve compared apologies in America and China have found a similar pattern: U.S. apologies serve to establish personal responsibility, while Chinese ones focus on the larger consequences of the transgression.
Only with a deep understanding of such differences can executives make effective use of the apology as a tool for facilitating negotiations, resolving conflicts, and repairing trust. And misunderstandings over apologies are just one aspect of a broad semantic disconnect between East and West that’s too often ignored in the rush to globalization. Managers would do well to tune in to other cultural nuances that are easily lost in translation.
Article reference source from Harvard Business Review