Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Human behaviour - as individuals, as groups, as `society - more than 200 `selfgoverning' nations around world. Language & religion logical variables to group
individuals.
Behavioural practices & business activities are linked to employee motivation,
relationship preferences, risk-taking behaviour, information & task processing
Many managers evaluate only countries they know & understand geographic vs
psychic/cultural distances, thus miss opportunities elsewhere, group nations on
the basis of broad similarities.
Possible strategies for dealing with cultural differences:
Little or no adjustment
Orientate/educate managers
Culture: specific learned norms of a society that reflect attitudes, values, &
beliefs that influence behaviour.
A Society: relatively homogeneous group of people, who share attitudes, values,
beliefs, & customs.
Culture set early in individuals life BUT dynamic & evolves over time due contact
with other cultures choice or imposition.
Cultural collision likely to occur if:
Firm implements practices not reflecting local customs/values and/or
Employees unable to accept/adjust to host-country customs
Basic similarity amongst people within a country is cause & effect of national
boundaries.
National identity perpetuated through rites/symbols of a country - largely based
on common perception of history.
Subcultures (eg. religion) may link groups from different nations more closely
than certain groups within nations.
Societal values/customs constantly evolve globalisation
Cultural imperialism = imposition of one culture on another
Elements from outside:
Creolization: Creolization is the process in which Creole cultures emerge in the
New World. As a result of colonization there was a mixture between people of
indigenous ethnicity.
Cultural diffusion: Cultural diffusion is the process by which a cultural item
spreads from group to group or society to society. For example fast food
restauraunts developed in the United States have taken over more sectors of the
world
Sequentially vs
Multi-task
Spoken
Explicit
Written
Implicit
Language
Perception of cues
vs
vs
Communication challenges when nations share same basic language - e.g. British,
American, & Canadian English - HSBC advertising campaign The Worlds Local
Bank
5- Long Term Orientation (LTO): This refers to how much society values
long-standing as opposed to short-term traditions and values. This
is the fifth dimension that Hofstede added in the 1990s, after finding
that Asian countries with a strong link to Confucian philosophy acted
differently from Western cultures. In countries with a high LTO score,
delivering on social obligations and avoiding "loss of face" are
considered very important.