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Vive la Différence, Eh?
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Business New Haven
11/25/2002
By: BNH
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NEW HAVEN - This just in: It's not just hockey, lumberjacks and Labatt's that separate Canadians from Americans - it's how they view their professional and personal lives.
Mel Prince, an associate professor of marketing at Southern Connecticut State University, recently studied nearly 300 American and Canadian sales staff from international pharmaceutical giant Bayer Corp. A total of 179 sales people from Bayer's North American pharma headquarters in West Haven were surveyed, along with 107 of their north-of-the-border peers, based in Toronto.
The Canada and the U.S. are bound by a shared border, language, culture and history, that kinship does not necessarily extend to business values and culture, Prince discovered.
Among other findings, Prince concluded that Canadian salespeople regularly endure more of a "tug of war" between their personal and professional lives than their American counterparts, and place less emphasis on career success when assessing their overall life happiness.
"People often think of Canada almost as a suburb of the U.S.," Prince observes. "But while the two do share many cultural similarities, there are also some major differences that have gone overlooked."
Prince says that "role strain" - stress generated by the competing interests of work and home life - was substantially higher among the Canadian sales staff. But when such strain occurs at high levels, it tends to have a greater negative impact on job performance and satisfaction among Americans than their northern counterparts.
Prince says he chose to sample field sales staff because such jobs are especially conducive to conflicts between professional and personal lives. Salespeople are often required to work nights or weekends as well as travel and spend significant amounts of time away from home.
"Work tends to be more salient or important to Americans than for the less competitive Canadians," says Prince. " Thus, distractions at work due to circumstances at home - although more prevalent among Canadian workers - impact Americans to a significantly greater degree than Canadians.
"Canadians are more accepting of this type of spillover of their home life into their work life," Prince adds.
"Americans tend to be better at blocking out their personal life distractions at work. But when they are unable to check these distractions, Americans suffer from higher stress levels when trying to juggle these competing interests at work."
Prince has submitted his study to the Journal of International Business Studies, and plans to present his findings at the Eastern Academy of Management next spring.
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