| Eckensberger (1990) noted that culture has no special status in cross-cultural psychology itself. He suggested that the culture concept should be introduced as a necessary ingredient to all psychology. The present research is an effort to employ culture concept in studying complex problem solving (CPS) in workgroups. Culture is understood as pragmatic meaning system which is constitutive of action as intended and interpreted coherently by members. CPS activities consist of canonical action sequences which are reasonable and intelligible for the participants. It is expected that different cultures would exhibit both similar and different types of action sequences. Syntex computer program was used for simulating the problem situations. Group members discussed to achieve decisions, based on which further developments of problem situation were simulated. The discussions were video-taped. Of sixteen German and eighteen Indonesian work-groups, two German and two Indonesian that differ in effectiveness are selected to be analyzed through speech-act sequence analysis (SASA). The result shows that there are basically four speech-act sequences common to all: the act of indicating the problem; and routine acts of finding-out, deliberating, and undertaking decisions. There are two types of deliberating act: the justifying-refuting, and voting type. No Indonesian culture-specific speech-act has been found. In contrast, 'the act of retrodicting the problem' is found to be a German culture-specific speech-act, regardless of group effectiveness. No culture-universal speech-act, constitutive of effectiveness, has been found. Two German culture specific factors of effectiveness have been identified: long (as opposed to routine) sequence of finding-out and of deliberating. |