Boundary Permeability as a Cultural Dimension

Abstract

Interviews conducted with American and Israeli managers and engineers who work together in the Silicon Valley, California, revealed that many of the cultural differences and difficulties encountered in cross cultural working relationships between members of the two cultures represent a single theme. The Americans were perceived and described as more compartmentalized and bounded in many respects, while the Israelis were perceived and described as more unbounded and as tending to disregard or cross boundaries. This theme repeated itself with regard to several types of boundaries: expressive boundaries, bureaucratic boundaries, temporal boundaries, and boundaries between work and non-work activities and relationships. These differences affected the quality of communication and the level of trust and cooperation between members of the two groups. Following these findings, and the observation that many of the cultural dimensions commonly used by social scientists can be conceived of in terms of differences in boundary permeability, we propose that cultures may differ on a meta-dimension of boundary rigidity versus permeability, and that such differences are consequential for cross cultural relations in organizations.