Something to readWorking with others
The Culture Map
A book on how work habits differ across cultures, and how to read the gap
Why it’s worth your time
The Culture Map gives you a way to read friction with colleagues from other countries before you decide it's about them as people. Erin Meyer, who teaches at INSEAD, places cultures on eight scales, such as how negative feedback is given and how trust is built.
Reading cultural differences at work
The book · About 5 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read for the eight scales.
Watch especially for the ones on how directly people give negative feedback, how decisions get made and how trust is built.
- Ask one colleague how they like to hear criticism.
Pick someone whose style puzzles you, or someone who reports to you. Ask how feedback was usually given where they worked before and how they'd like it from you, and tell them your own habit too.
You“How do you prefer to hear it when something you've worked on needs changing? And how was that usually done where you worked before?”
Good moments for this: when you join a team spread across countriesbefore a first review with a new reportafter an email that went down badly
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Meyer's scales only work relative to where you sit, so the colleague who seems vague to you may seem direct to someone else on the same team.
What might make this harder
Ask about the person's experience instead of their nationality: where they've worked and what was normal there. Meyer notes that Americans in particular can be sensitive about discussing group identity, and that the silence leaves everyone reading through their own lens.
Questions people ask
What is The Culture Map about?
Erin Meyer's 2014 book, based on her work at INSEAD, mapping eight scales on which national cultures differ at work, including feedback, decision-making and trust, with stories of the misunderstandings they cause and advice for working across them.
Does The Culture Map stereotype people?
Meyer says she set out to move past simple stereotypes, and her examples often run against them: the French, in her telling, are less explicit than Americans in general but more direct with criticism. The scales still generalize about countries, so they work best as a starting question.
How do I give feedback to someone from another culture?
Ask how they're used to hearing it, notice whether your own habit is to soften or to state things plainly, and adjust toward them for the messages that matter most.
What it says, and how it holds up
An American manager calls in a French employee to tell her what has to change, opening with praise, as many US managers are trained to do. She leaves thinking it's the most positive feedback a boss has ever given her; he thinks he has just told her off. Erin Meyer, an American professor at INSEAD in France, builds The Culture Map from moments like that. A culture's habits, in Meyer's telling, only make sense next to someone else's. A team of British and French colleagues may find the French chaotic about time, and Indian colleagues joining later may find the same French rigid.
Any one colleague can sit far from their country's average on her scales. They describe tendencies across a whole country. Meyer says as much herself: in any cross-cultural moment, some of what's going on is cultural and some is personal. Her map is built for international business, so region, generation, profession and company culture get less attention. Country comparisons like hers run back to Geert Hofstede's work in the 1970s and 80s, and the caution has research behind it: a 2016 analysis by Vas Taras, Piers Steel and Bradley Kirkman found more cultural variation within countries than between them.
Calling friction culture can be a way of not dealing with it, when it's really about workload or credit. The scales tend to help most when the same misunderstanding keeps happening and nobody can say why.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.