Johannes Sends and receives an email

Johannes is an auditor in a multinational firm, based in Rotterdam Holland, who is under pressure from a client for a financial statement result from a Mexican subsidiary of the mother company.
Frustrated by the pressure he is under; he sends an email to his counterpart in Mexico Pablo Mendenez, despite sending him several emails about the topic and not getting any reply.
His email was described as ‘facts and figures’. To his surprise, Johannes receives an email from his counterpart in Mexico, where Pablo is clearly offended by the first email.
Pablo’s reply to the email puzzled not only Johannes, but also his two colleagues working with him in Holland.
Johannes works in Holland, and most probably makes part of the ‘Germanic Europe’ culture cluster: he is assertive, aggressive, result and task oriented, has a ‘future orientation’: he is mainly concerned with future results and doesn’t give time or attention to gratification and asking or celebrating the past.
On the other hand, Pablo is Mexican. He most probably belongs to the Latin America Cluster: he is collectivistic, has a great deal of respect to people with authority, experiences levels of anxiety when threatened with high level of uncertainty, and is emotional and relationship-oriented.
The perception from Johannes point of view is that by writing this email, Pablo his counterpart, will understand the urge and the level of importance of this email and will make him jump into action and submit the financial results. Johannes expresses: he was shocked – puzzled by the answer. Johannes and his Dutch and Belgian colleagues said: you got the point across clearly. For him, he proposed a solution with a timeline also a set or future actions to avoid such delays. (The email had bullet points and clear tasks)
On the other hand, Pablo receives an email with direct orders from a counterpart that is his equal in hierarchy, he read the terms: ‘today’ – and a requirement for a weekly report to send ‘as of today’. He is being treated as a subordinate to an equal counterpart .For him, the email is about orders, deadlines and reports as well as weekly reports to his equal Dutch counterpart.
Clearly the problem in this situation is a cross-cultural clash between the typical Germanic European person and the Latin American person.
While the Dutch auditor sent a direct email with facts, figures, solutions, and proposal for actions to avoid future delays, Johannes did not think and did not have the cultural intelligence to predict how this will be viewed by his Mexican counterpart. Most probably the Dutch orientation would be the Task, with high individualism and low power distance, which explains his tome and wordings of the email.
This comes in clash with a Mexican person who has stronger values for Hierarchy (which is clear in his email since he always stresses about his management orders) and collectivism (also clear where he directly accuses his counterpart on passing the ball of accusation, and also not being involved in the reasons behind the delay).
When Johannes read the email, he was shocked. For him, he sent an email for an update on a report, with a deadline and future steps for avoiding delays in future reports. What he and his colleagues did not understand is that his email was viewed as a direct order from an equal with a deadline and orders which is viewed as insulting for his Mexican counterpart. What he does not understand is that for the Latin American work culture, people value authority figures, and also value collectivism which means that they would value the feeling of belonging to the same group in order to work or collaborate more smoothly.
It is mentioned at first that Johannes took 30 minutes to cool off and then changed the wordings of his email to facts and figures. Johannes should have changed his email using cultural intelligence to make sure his intentions and objective will be well understood by his Mexican counterpart.
First of all, Johannes must understand the difference in culture and make sure that his email is interpreted right. Second, according to the culture group of which his counterpart belongs to, he should apply a different leadership style: for this case, a humane - oriented style would have been better. He should not by any mean blame his counterpart and reach a common ground of understanding to the nature of the problem, the root and how to solve it.
What Johannes can do, is first of all, send an email explaining his real intention behind the email and apologize for any misunderstanding and invite Pablo for a video conference or a phone conference.
Second of all, Johannes must approach Pablo first by asking him why is he late in the report and show him that they are in the same problem together, after getting to know him better and breaking the ice with him. Johannes must be compassionate and show him sincere care to Pablo’s problem and assure him that no one is blaming him for any delay since his management ‘has other priorities’.
Johannes has to ask Pablo’s opinion on how they can solve the problem and then maybe contact the local management of the Mexican subsidiary in order to make this report a priority for the local auditors.