CULTURAL MANAGEMENT

What Are the Cultural Differences in Management?

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What Are the Cultural Differences in Management?

Literature Review

The main factor that motivates industries to expand beyond its borders is the increase in globalization. By January 2008, Canada, Mexico, Germany, China, Japan, United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan were among the top ten industry partners of the United States. These industry partners of US, exports 60.47 per cent of their product while import 34.49 per cent of US products (Kandola, 2008). Since, imports and exports require the involvement of people and organizations their environment has become increasingly diverse. Though, there are numerous benefits of this global expansion of industries, however this also increase diversity which is likely to produce certain management issues mainly conflict (Khamis, 2010). Diverse workforce is the term refers to the team comprising of people having different cultural background. Different cultural background means that different communication patterns and values are being hold among one team (Kalliny, Cruthirds and Minor, 2006). This often led to misinterpretation of the viewpoints among team, and ultimately sustain as a major cause of conflict at workplace. Moreover, the role of cultural values is vital in developing understanding regarding how individuals manage and perceive cultural difference (Fischer and Poortinga, 2012; Jackson, 2011).

Cultural differences are frequently encountered by managers today with the increase in global multicultural business. These differences may create hurdles in successful completion of different tasks. This paper in this connection will attempt to review literature related to cultural differences and will try to present appropriate examples with arguments.

Popular Cultural Differences Framework

Studies conducted by Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars are considered leading in context of cross-cultural management. The approaches of Hofstede and Trompenaars propose a set of cultural dimensions in order to arrange dominant value systems. Human feelings, emotions, thinking and actions are greatly affected by the value system in a predictable manner (Fischer and Poortinga, 2012). These two sets of cultural dimension reflect some of the basic issues of every society, which needed to be addressed in order to find solution (Higgs, n.d.; Hofstede, 1992). Both approaches to cultural divesture have similar as well as unique features, which can be grouped into different categories:

1) Relations between people

There are two main cultural differences identified by Hofstede and Trompenaars. Hofstede presented a difference between collectivism and individualism. On the contrary, Trompenaars break these differences into two dimensions (Hofstede, 1992): individualism versus communitarianism and universalism versus particularism.



2) Motivational orientation

Variety of methods is adopted by societies to address the inherent living uncertainty. Hofstede in this category had identified three dimensions: femininity versus masculinity, power distance and amount of uncertainty avoidance.



3) Attitudes toward time

Short term versus long-term versus orientations were recognized by Hofstede in this category. Whereas, synchronic versus sequential and outer versus inner time are the two dimension identified by Trompenaars.

However, socio-cultural dimensions as an additional category were presented by Aycan et al in which he discusses two dimensions paternalism and fatalism. In paternalistic dimension, superiors or elders are assigned the role to ...