Riding the Waves of Culture

Understanding Diversity in Global Business

Charles Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars

• Verlag: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529370133
• Thema: Betriebswirtschaft
• Thema: Internationale Wirtschaft

For over 25 years, Riding the Waves of Culture has set the standard for leading effectively in an international business context. Helping leaders to be highly attuned to cultural differences, and to leverage such differences for maximum competitive advantage.Retaining its in-depth exploration of underlying cultural frameworks that have made it a business classic, Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition provides new, evidence-based information and insights on critical business matters, including:
- How to enhance and improve chances of success in M&A deals by expertly handling corporate and cultural differences
- Ways of improving and handling competencies, dilemmas, servant leadership, innovation, and remote-team effectiveness in an increasingly diverse business world
- New analyses of changes over the past decades that are moving the world closer to a single 'global village'Renowned experts in their field, the authors also include new chapters and updates on:
- the meaning of culture
- how to assess cultural competence
- change management
- assessing organisation culture
- diversity and ethnicityThe most thoroughly researched and highly respected resource of its kind, Riding the Waves of Culture does more than help you stay afloat in today's diverse work environment; it provides the knowledge you need to seize the advantage and compete for the long run.

1

An Introduction to Culture

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner

THIS BOOK is about cultural differences and how they affect the process of doing business and managing. It is not about how to understand the people of different nationalities. It is our belief that you can never understand other cultures. Those who are married know that it is impossible ever completely to understand even people of your own culture. The Dutch author (Fons Trompenaars) became interested in this subject before it grew popular because his father is Dutch and his mother is French. It gave him an understanding of the fact that if something works in one culture, there is little chance that it will work in another. No Dutch “management” technique his father tried to use ever worked very effectively in his French family.

This is the context in which we started wondering if any of the American management techniques and philosophies with which we were brainwashed in many years of the best business education money could buy would apply in the Netherlands or the UK, where we came from, or indeed in the rest of the world.

Both authors have been studying the effect of culture on management for many years. This book describes much of what we have discovered. The different cultural orientations described result from 25 years of academic and field research. Many of the anecdotes and cases used in the text have come up in the course of more than 1,000 cross-cultural training programs we have given in over 25 countries. The names of the companies used in most of the cases are disguised.

Apart from the training program material, a diverse range of companies, including most of the global corporates and other major players with departments spanning over 60 different countries, have contributed to the research. In order to gather comparable samples, a minimum of 100 people with similar backgrounds and occupations were originally taken in each of the countries in which the companies operated to provide basic reference cultural norms. Approximately 75 percent of these participants belong to management (managers in operations, marketing, sales, and so on), while the remaining 25 percent were general administrative staff (typists, personal assistants, etc.). Our original cultural database comprised some 80,000 of these respondents and has been extended in several ways. We have added more responses from managers and business leaders across the world, which has resulted in much more than just an increase in sample sizes. This database now extends to some 140,000 participants. Another 20,000 have completed partial responses to this basic cultural diagnostic in combination with other surveys.

With the continuing growth and pervasion of the Internet, we have continued to add many other cultural measurement instruments and have developed associated ancillary databases and apps to disclose them. These include another 20,000 responses to our deductive assessments of intercultural competence and transcultural leadership, corporate effectiveness and sustainability, cultural aspects of personality and team development, and innovation. In a separate text-oriented database, we have collected and coded data comprising nearly 50,000 dilemmas and associated reconciliations.

In response to demand, we increasingly make adapted versions of our online tools available to other responses such as students of business and management and spouse of expatriates. These are flagged appropriately as different respondents.

With much more data to draw on, we are able to reaffirm the constructs presented in earlier editions but also to extend debate to issues of longitudinal studies of cultural shifts. We can also drill down to age and generation differences as well as functional areas and discuss issues of cultural convergence and acculturation.

The empirical results are, however, just an illustration of what we are trying to say.

This book attempts to do three things: dispel the notion that there is “one best way” of managing and organizing; give readers a better understanding of their own culture and cultural differences in general, by learning how to recognize and cope with these in a business context; and provide some cultural insights into the “global” versus “local” dilemma facing international organizations. Possibly the most important aspect of the book is the second. We believe understanding our own culture and our own assumptions and expectations about how people “should” think and act is the basis for success.

The Impact of Culture on Business

Take a look at the new breed of international managers, educated according to the most modern management philosophies. They all know that in the SBU, TQM should reign, with products delivered JIT, where CFTs distribute products while subject to MBO, AI, and tested through MVPs. If this is not done appropriately, we need to BPR. (SBU = strategic business unit; TQM = total quality management; JIT = just-in-time; CFT = customer first team; MBO = management by objectives; AI = artificial intelligence; MVP=Minimum Viable Product; BPR = business process reengineering.)

But just how universal are these management solutions? Are these “truths” about what effective management really is: truths that can be applied anywhere, under any circumstances?

Even with experienced international companies, many well-intended “universal” applications of management theory have turned out badly. For example, pay-for-performance has in many instances been a failure on the African continent because there are particular, though unspoken, rules about the sequence and timing of rewards and promotions. Similarly, management-by-objectives schemes have generally failed within subsidiaries of multinationals in southern Europe, because managers have not wanted to conform to the abstract nature of preconceived policy guidelines.

Even the notion of human-resource management is difficult to translate to other cultures, coming as it does from a typically Anglo-Saxon doctrine. It borrows from economics the idea that human beings are “resources” like physical and monetary resources. It tends to assume almost unlimited capacities for individual development. In countries without these beliefs, this concept is hard to grasp and unpopular once it is understood.

International managers have it tough. They must operate on a number of different premises at any one time. These premises arise from their culture of origin, the culture in which they are working, and the culture of the organization that employs them.

In every culture in the world such phenomena as authority, bureaucracy, creativity, good fellowship, verification, and accountability are experienced in different ways. That we use the same words to describe them tends to make us unaware that our cultural biases and our accustomed conduct may not be appropriate or shared.

There is a presumption that internationalization will create, or at least lead to, a common culture worldwide. This would make the life of international managers much simpler. People point to McDonald’s or Coca-Cola as examples of tastes, markets, and hence cultures becoming similar everywhere. Indeed, many products and services are becoming common to world markets. What is important to consider, however, is not what they are and where they are found physically, but what they mean to the people in each culture. As we will describe later, the essence of culture is not what is visible on the surface. It is the shared ways groups of people understand and interpret the world. So the fact that we can all communicate with iPhones, listen to iTunes and Spotify, and eat hamburgers tells us that there are some novel products that can be sold on a universal message, but it does not tell us what eating hamburgers or listening to iTunes and Spotify means in different cultures. Dining at McDonald’s was at one time a show of status in Moscow, whereas it is a fast meal for a fast buck in New York. If businesspeople want to gain understanding of and allegiance to their corporate goals, policies, products, or services wherever they are doing business, they must understand what those and other aspects of management mean in different cultures.

In addition to exploring why universal applications of Western management theory may not work, we will also try to deal with the growing dilemma facing international managers known as “glocalization.”

As markets globalize, the need for standardization in organizational design, systems, and procedures increases. Yet managers are also under pressure to adapt their organization to the local characteristics of the market, the legislation, the fiscal regime, the sociopolitical system, and the cultural system. This balance between consistency and adaptation is essential for corporate success.

Paralysis Through Analysis: The Elixir of the Management Profession

Peters and Waterman in In Search of Excellence hit the nail on the head with their critique of “the rational model” and “paralysis through analysis.” Western analytical thinking (taking a phenomenon to pieces) and rationality (reckoning the consequences before you act) have led to many international successes in fields of technology. Indeed, technologies do work by the same universal rules everywhere, even on the moon. Yet the very success of the universalistic philosophy now threatens to become a handicap when applied to interactions between human beings from different cultures.

The human being is a special piece of technology, and the results of our studies, extensively discussed in this book, indicate that the social world of the international organization has many more dimensions to deal with.

Some managers, especially in Japan, recognize the multidimensional character of their company. They seem able to use a logic appropriate to machines (analytic-rational) and a logic more appropriate to social relations (synthetic-intuitive), switching between these as needed.

In the process of internationalization the Japanese increasingly take the functioning of local society seriously. They were not the first to observe “Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more” (“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”), but they seem to act on this more than Westerners do. The Japanese have, moreover, added another dimension: “When in Rome, understand the behavior of the Romans, and thus become an even more complete Japanese.”

In opposition we have our Western approach, based on American business education, which treats management as a profession and regards emotionally detached rationality as “scientifically” necessary. This numerical, cerebral approach dominates not only American business schools, but also other economic and business faculties. Such schools educate their students by giving them the right answers to the wrong questions. Statistical analysis, forecasting techniques, and operational studies are not “wrong.” These are important technical skills. The mistake is to assume that technical rationality should characterize the human element in the organization. No one is denying the existence of universally applicable scientific laws with objective consequences. These are, indeed, culture-free. However, the belief that human cultures in the workplace should resemble the laws of physics and engineering is a cultural, not a scientific, belief. It is a universal assumption that does not win universal agreement, or even come close to doing so.

The internationalization of business life requires more knowledge of cultural patterns. Pay-for-performance, for example, can work out well in the cultures where we have had most of our training: the USA, the Netherlands, and the UK. In more communitarian cultures like France, Germany, and large parts of Asia it may not be so successful, at least not the Anglo-Saxon version of pay-for-performance. Employees may not accept that individual members of the group should excel in a way that reveals the shortcomings of other members. Their definition of an “outstanding individual” is one who benefits those closest to him or her. Customers in more communitarian cultures also take offense at the “quick buck” mentality of the best salespeople; they prefer to build up relationships carefully and maintain them.

How Proven Formulas Can Lead to Wrong Result

Why is it that many management processes lose effectiveness when cultural borders are crossed?

Many multinational companies apply formulas in overseas areas that are derived from, and are successful in, their own culture. International management consulting firms of Anglo-Saxon origin are still using similar methods to the neglect of cultural differences.

An Italian computer company received advice from a prominent international management consulting firm to restructure to a matrix organization. It did so and failed; the task-oriented approach of the matrix structure challenged loyalty to the functional boss. In Italy bosses are like fathers, and you cannot have two fathers.

Culture is like gravity: you do not experience it until you jump six feet into the air. Local managers may not openly criticize a centrally developed appraisal system or reject the matrix organization, especially if confrontation or defiance is not culturally acceptable to them. In practice, though, beneath the surface, the silent forces of culture operate a destructive process, biting at the roots of centrally developed methods that do not “fit” locally.

The flat hierarchy, SBUS, MBO, matrix organizations, assessment centers, TQM, BPR, AI, MVP, and pay-for-performance are subjects of discussion in nearly every bestseller about management, and not only in the Western world. Reading these books (for which managers happily do not have much time anymore) creates a feeling of euphoria. “If I follow these Ten Commandments, I’ll be the modern leader, the change master, the champion.” A participant from Korea told us in quite a cynical tone that he admired the USA for solving one of the last major problems in business—how to get rid of people in the process of reengineering. The idea of the “one best way” is a management fallacy that is dying a slow death.

Although the organizational theory developed in the 1970s introduced the environment as an important consideration, it was unable to kill the dream of the one best way of organizing. It did not measure the effects of national culture, but systematically pointed to the importance of the market, the technology, and the product for determining the most effective methods of management and organization.

If you study similar organizations in different cultural environments, they often turn out to be remarkably uniform by major criteria: number of functions, levels of hierarchy, degree of specialization, and so on. Instead of proving anything, this may mean little more than that uniformity has been imposed on global operations, or that leading company practices have been carefully imitated, or even that technologies have their own imperatives. Research of this kind has often claimed that this “proves” that the organization is culture-free. But the wrong questions have been asked. The issue is not whether a hierarchy in the Netherlands has six levels, as does a similar company in Singapore, but what the hierarchy and those levels mean to the Dutch and Singaporeans. Where the meaning is totally different—for example, a “chain of command” versus “a family”—then human-resource policies developed to implement the first will seriously miscommunicate in the latter context.

In this book we examine the visible and invisible ways in which culture impacts on organizations. The more fundamental differences in culture and their effects may not be directly measurable by objective criteria, but they will certainly play a very important role in the success of an international organization.

Culture Is the Way in Which People Solve Problems

A useful way of thinking about where culture comes from is the following: culture is the way in which a group of people solves problems and reconciles dilemmas.¹ The particular problems and dilemmas each culture must resolve will be discussed below. If we focus first on what culture is, perhaps it is easiest to start with this example.

Imagine you are on a flight to South Africa and the pilot says, “We have some problems with the engine, so we will land temporarily in Burundi” (for those who do not know Burundi, it is next to Rwanda). What is your first impression of Burundi culture once you enter the airport building? It is not “what a nice set of values these people have,” or even “don’t they have an interesting shared system of me...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• How to use this eBook
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. An Introduction to Culture
• Section I: National Culture and Personal Values
• Section II: Corporate Cultures and Change Management
• Section III: Reconciling Cultural Dilemmas
• Section IV: Culture in Practice
• Appendix A: Supporting Diagnostic Tools and Apps
• Appendix B: Technical Aspects of the Trompenaars’ Databases
• Notes
• Footnotes
• About the Authors
• Copyright