While learning a foreign language, you are bound to come across false friends. However, the false friends in question are not people but words. Special words, once could say – especially dangerous ones. They look familiar, but at a closer look they turn out to mean something completely different from what we expect. A student of Polish who knows English could assume that the Polish word “pupil” means “pupil”, because it looks identical to the English word - unfortunately, that is not the case. The Polish word means something completely different: „a favourite/teacher's pet”. There are many of such words, and students need to be careful. Below, the reader can find a list of some false friends.

However, some false friends are especially interesting – those which thanks to the difference in meaning show cultural differences. It may seem that differences among nations in Europe are becoming blurred, and in view of integration processes they cease to play an important role. It would be difficult to deny.

Nevertheless, numerous differences which still determine the idiosyncratic nature of nations or cultures have remained. In this article, I would like to take a closer look at the word “kolega”. Both English „colleague” and German „Kollege” indicate a person we work with. What, therefore, constitutes the basis of this word's meaning is an objective relationship: the fact that we work together. In Polish, the meaning of “kolega” is only seemingly the same. It is used in a similar context – to describe people we work with – but it is only one of the possible contexts. In the Polish language a colleague is, first and foremost, someone we know and we like more than an acquaintance and less than a close friend. In other words, it is the subjective relationship – the degree of closeness between two people - not objective one that determines whether someone is a colleague or not. This difference reveals an extremely important feature of Polish working culture. What defines the employee’s position in the team in Polish companies is not solely the function he/she performs, but emotional relationships which connect this person with other team members. Western managers emphasise that the Polish working environment tends to be unstable. This is due to the fact that for Polish employees personal relationship with team members is more important than procedures. On the other hand, it is often pointed out that teams composed of Polish employees are very effective in crisis situations; another characteristic typical of them is great creativity related to so-called “emotional intelligence”. The above-mentioned nature of Polish working environment becomes crucial when personnel of a given company, as a result of a certain decision, begins to be managed by managerial staff coming from one of the western European countries. Such a situation may lead to tension or even conflicts, which, in turn, result in establishing antagonism between the managerial staff and the employees, thus significantly decreasing work efficiency. It is, however, possible to approach the potential conflict in a creative way and construct a model which combines the valuable aspects of both approaches to work. A Polish colleague should pay more attention to procedures, but in order to do it, he/she has to understand and acquire what is obvious to a colleague from the West, namely the fact that procedures may facilitate and order work. The resistance against procedures may seem incomprehensible, but it ceases to surprise when one realises that the majority of professionally active Poles have experienced firsthand communist absurdities, and that the sphere of private, personal and frequently emotional references used to be the only hiding place. For this reason, the manager who implements and enforces a given procedure should move one step backwards and begin with explaining the sense of the procedure itself. On the other hand, the western colleague should appreciate and respect the “human” emotional dimension of work, which is so important to Poles, all the more so because it enriches the team as well as improves work's quality and productivity. It is worth remembering that apart from the work “kolega”, which is used to refer to a man there is also the word koleżanka, which is used for women.

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