As in a HC (High-context) culture, people are deeply involved with each other and the
relationships between people are complicated, especially in working places. As a
result, people in Shanghai subsidiary prefer to work collectively. However, this
deeply involved relationship does not extend outside the group: people within the
same group can communicate without any hesitation; people do not belong to the
same group will hardly communicate with each other. In addition, according to
Holden (2002) that in a low-context culture, people coming from other cultures can
easily match these machinations, but in a high-context culture, these high-context
machinations cannot be easily matched by people coming from low-context culture.
As the manager come from a low-context Sweden, The Swede production manager
has the feeling that there are not enough communications between the Swedish
company and its subsidiary in Shanghai, and when he tries to communicate with Chinese employees they seem afraid of expressing themselves.