Patrons dine by candlelight at a downtown Peterborough, Canada, restaurant during a blackout Thursday.

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shows that keeping an emotional distance may not be the most effective way to get the job done, said Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a psychologist who led the study. Friendly workers pay attention to indirect meanings, work well with other cultures and are perceived as trustworthy. An impersonal style blinds workers from noticing differences in style. They often fail to notice nonverbal communication, Sanchez-Burks said.

Writing in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sanchez-Burks said he traded notes with colleagues at the University of Michigan, Seoul National University in Korea and the International Business University in Nanjing, China.

Sanchez-Burks ran several experiments, having students and employees in Fortune 500 firms act out work scenarios. „An impersonal style tends to restrict the bandwidth of information a person attends to in the workplace,“ he said. „What is literally said will be followed closely but information about the context in which the information is conveyed — information often critical for task success and productivity — is lost. This type of miscommunication, like ships passing in the night, is fur ther exacerbated in diverse organizations (domestically and internationally) because rarely are people with other cultural backgrounds as impersonal as mainstream Americans.“

This impersonal attitude at work is rooted in Protestant beliefs of putting emotion aside at the office, Sanchez-Burks said in a telephone interview this week. The American style of keeping things impersonal at the workplace is virtually confined to the United States, he said. Workers in South Korea, Japan and India and especially Latin American countries place high importance on personal relationships at work, he said. Sanchez-Burks said Latin Americans become friends with people they are doing business with first and then move onto the work while Americans work first and then become friends. Sanchez-Burks does not argue that Americans are completely impersonal. In social settings, the researchers found Americans to be highly friendly.

The challenge is transferring that behavior into the workplace. „For a very long time, (this impersonal work ethic) has been seen as essential to the success of Western business organizations. So it‘s difficult to accept that staying on task may actually be a barrier to productivity in today‘s global environment,“ Sanchez-Burks said.

Reuters