Short Distance and Communication Jolanta Sz, Professor, Poland
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Guillermo Iturriaga: I can not agree with you that shortening the distance between the manager and employee by permitting subordinates to call their bosses by first name, is always a good thing to do.
First of all, it depends of the national culture and organizational culture. But even when the latter urges such behaviors it can bring unexpected results. Theoretically one can feel that the distance is shortened and, sometimes, wants to use such situation for his/her owngoals. Such situation can be also misleading and leading to quite a lot of disappointment steaming out of erroneous assessment of the real type of relation.
There are countries where common behavior is, for example, to call university professors by their first name-no matter how old is professors are- and there are other countries where such behavior is inappropriate but this has nothing to do with good communication.
