Cross Cultural Diversity in Engineering Professionals - Russia, India, America

摘要

In this global world, today's engineer is likely to have to work in global international teams with colleagues from other nationalities. The challenge for many engineering curricula is how to include, in a realistic way, this global dimension and increase the student's awareness of the issues that are encountered. However as curricula begins to be developed, it would be beneficial to study what the differences might be between cultures. To expose the issues that may be encountered for future multidisciplinary teams made up of students from USA, Russia and India, the Miville Guzman Universal Diversity Scale (MGUDS-S) survey and form which assesses cross cultural diversity was used to measure differences between American and Indian engineers. Data using the MGUDS-S survey was collected from a population of Indian professional business people and entrepreneurs attending a personal development program and compared their responses to data collected for a similar survey with predominantly Russian business people and entrepreneurs. This latter comparison group was made up of experienced professional business people and entrepreneurs from around the world including a large population of academics from Russia, plus entrepreneurs from Mexico, Luxembourg, Australia, South Africa, Uzbekistan, Brazil, and Finland. This international group has quite similar demographics to the Indian group and is being used as a reasonable comparison for project-minded professionals. Both groups should have very similar attitudes as expected. However significant and interesting differences have been found and are discussed in the paper. A strikingly higher emotional discomfort level was found in Indian male participants for cross cultural diversity. In addition this study studied the differences between male and female responses across cultures. Finally the results of these two studies were compared to the results of surveys with engineering students from U.S.A., Germany, Poland and Russia from previous cross cultural diversity studies conducted by the authors.