When you’re on a global team, cultural differences can be complex—and often seem contradictory. The biggest challenge comes when differences are complex in surprising ways. What are the likely sources of cultural difficulties you’ll encounter with your global teams?

Erin Meyer, author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (PublicAffairs, June 2014), has built up quite a lot of data on cultural differences. She’s drawn on that work to provide pair comparisons for a number of counties in a recent post for the HBR Blog Network, which you may find useful.

You can see the comparisons on this interactive exercise provided by the Harvard Business Review website.