CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Cultural differences and people management

Cultural differences and people management

Introduction

The concept of cultural differences at workplace and organizations/ society may require understanding why people still do not constitute the majority of managers. According to French (2007, 11) additionally, in particular business sub sectors, staff members would be considered a “different” group. Again, both a true understanding of the definition of cultural differences and its nuances within the society along with a better understanding of the connection between diversity and an organization's performance are necessary components of making a case for diversifying the workforce.

Globalization and regionalization of business have increasingly compelled us to integrate the concept of cultural variation into business research and practice. Research covering these dynamics spans a wide array of academic disciplines, including international business, comparative management, and cross-cultural social, organizational and cognitive psychology. Cross-cultural organizational behaviour covers several levels of analysis, examining how culture affects intra-individual phenomena (e.g., cognition, emotions); interpersonal phenomena (e.g., teams, communications, power) and firm-level phenomena (e.g., work practices, organizational structure). A growing and important area of cross-cultural organizational behaviour focuses on meso research examining the interplay between these levels of analysis (Bellah, 2005, 11).

Definition Of Culture

Before we can examine any cross-cultural research, we must clarify what we mean by 'culture.' In the academic world, there is no single, widely accepted definition of culture. One school of thought sees culture as an explicit and implicit pattern of reactions cognitive, affective and behavioural to various situations and actions. Herskovits provided another influential conceptualization of culture, defined as 'the man-made part of the human environment' (Hui, 2006, 152)

In contrast to the idea of culture as artifacts and visible manifestations, Hofstede calls culture the 'software of the mind.' Triandis distinguishes between the objective and the subjective elements of culture: Objective elements include, for example, tools and radio stations, while subjective elements include values, beliefs, norms, and categorizations. Rohner's widely-cited definition of culture is '… the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings maintained by a human population, or by identifiable segments of a population, and transmitted from one generation to the next' [italics in original]. Three aspects of Rohner's conceptualization bear further elaboration:

Meanings and values: more than just a behavioural manifestation, culture provides the underlying belief and value system that helps people interpret, understand and evaluate their environment. Although it is unlikely that any single individual in a given population knows the totality of meanings that define a culture, as long as a culture contains 'complementary meanings' people can interact in predictable, important ways.

Cultural differences

Cultural groups can differ widely in their beliefs about what is true, good, and efficient. The study of cultural differences combines perspectives in psychology and anthropology to understand a society's signature pattern of beliefs, behaviour, and social institutions and how these patterns compare and contrast to those of other cultural groups.

Cultural differences appear both between and within societies, for example, between Canadians and Japanese, and within the United States between Anglos and Latinos. Descriptions of cultural differences are made in context ...