The Culture Map: Breaking through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business

Meyer examines how cultures differ in the way they build and interpret trust in business relationships. She contrasts cognitive trust, grounded in competence and reliability, with affective trust, rooted in emotional closeness and personal connection. Through vivid case studies, such as the Brazilian–American merger where efficiency clashed with warmth and the Swiss–Chinese negotiation that only succeeded after building guanxi (a Chinese concept of personal connection and reciprocal trust), Meyer shows that misunderstanding how trust forms can derail even the most promising partnerships. To visualize this, she introduces the trusting scale, which maps cultures from task-based (US, UK, Germany) to relationship-based (Brazil, China, India), arguing that trust-building methods mirror broader societal histories, including legal reliability, collectivist traditions, and the interplay of emotion and reason in professional life.

Her analysis contextualizes trust as both a psychological and sociocultural construct. In task-based societies with strong legal systems, trust is transactional and contractual; in relationship-based cultures, where institutional reliability is weaker or where social cohesion is prized, trust replaces the contract itself. Meyer extends this with metaphors like the “peach” and “coconut” to explain openness in social interactions and explores how rituals such as shared meals or nomunication (building relationships over drinks) in Japan function as cultural mechanisms for establishing affective trust.