In our second assignment, we looked over some information gathered by Robert Kohls, regarding American values, and how it can be seen as negative by people that are not familiar with our culture. Upon reading the long list, I was surprised to see how different cultures, can have different points of views regarding things that we probably don’t think twice about, like our American values.

This assignment brought to light, to me personally, how brash the American culture can be. Personally I chose the directness and openness value and how valuable that is in America, but in reality that can be seen as harmful in other cultures. I related that value to my workplace and how helpful being direct can be in the financial industry. I am relating a lot of the information from this class to my I/O psychology course. In that course we are learning about the psychology of the workplace, and a recent lesson compared and contrasted American workplaces, to the workplaces in Asia. I correlated this very closely to the Kohls’ theories, and found that there are many things to learn from other cultures and how they conduct business, and in regards to Kohls’ ideas, how we can learn to interact with others that don’t necessarily share the same points of view.