MULTINATIONAL ORGANIZATION

Cultural Influences of Multinational Organizations



Cultural Influences of Multinational Organizations

There is no doubt that the two kinds of culture both exert powerful influences on people.  It is anything but rare for employees, especially those of foreign companies, to be facing conflicts between them. A company's culture may be informal while a country's culture could be rather formal.  A company may be encouraging and rewarding risk-taking in a country where people are generally risk-averse.  Or, vice versa.  All of these call for some kind of resolution to realign the company's and its individual employees' beliefs and behaviors.

National Cultures

As researchers have found over and over, the influences of national cultures shape strong value systems among their members.  The resulting shared values, preferences, and behaviors of popula-tion groups differ widely between countries.  That is frequently also the case between different subgroups within a country, so keep in mind that the term “national culture” can be misleading.  It may only be referring to part of the people in a given country.

Organizational Cultures

The benefit of cultivating a pronounced organizational culture is that it helps establish common values and align behaviors among employees.  Many multinational companies use employee hand-books, corporate ethics guidelines, written value definitions, and other tools for their employees world-wide in order to drive this kind of alignment.

One may ask to what extent organizational cultures are based on national cultures.  Available research results in this field are insufficient for a conclusive answer.  However, a few published results, combined with anecdotal evidence, suggest that while there is a strong correlation, organi-zational cultures are also shaped by many other influences.

Especially in the United States with its strong preference for individualism, a wide and diverse range of company cultures exists.  An organization's culture may reflect the personality and preferences of its founder or founding team, as with ...