The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management Research

Peter B. Smith, Mark F. Peterson, David C. Thomas

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412940269
• eBook ISBN: 9781483342696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Renowned international experts Peter B. Smith, Mark F. Peterson, and David C. Thomas, editors of the The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management, have drawn together scholars in the field of management from around the world to contribute vital information from their cross-national studies to this innovative, comprehensive tome. Chapters explore links between people and organizations, providing useful cultural perspectives on the most significant topics in the field of organizational behavior—such as motivation, human resource management, and leadership —and answering many of the field?s most controversial methodological questions.


Key Features

• Presents innovative perspectives on the cultural context of organizations: In addition to straightforward coverage of structures and processes, this Handbook addresses locally distinctive, indigenous views of organizational processes from around the world and considers the interplay of climate and wealth when analyzing how organizations operate.
• Offers an integrated theoretical framework: At the start of each substantive section, the Editors provide context for the upcoming chapters by discussing how prevalent cultures in different parts of the world place emphasis on particular aspects of organizational processes and outcomes.
• Boasts a global group of contributing scholars: This Handbook features contributing authors from around the world who represent an outstanding mix of respected, long-standing scholars in cross-cultural management as well as newer names already impacting the literature.
• Provides an authoritative agenda for the future development of the field: All chapters conclude with a list of promising avenues for further research and a focus on issues that remain unresolved.

Intended Audience
This Handbook is an ideal resource for researchers, instructors, professionals, and graduate students in fields of business, management, and psychology.

PART I

Orientation

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Peter B. Smith

Mark F. Peterson

David C. Thomas

The field of cross-cultural management research encompasses both international comparative research about aspects of management and intercultural research into multinational organizations. In this volume, we have organized our coverage of these topics into four research domains. These are the essence of culture, the links between people and organizations, organizational structures and processes, and managing a multinational workforce. The first four chapters offer perspectives on basic conceptual and methodological issues originating mainly within psychology, sociology, and anthropology, which find their way into research that is covered in many of the more focused chapters that follow. Following these introductory chapters, Part II centers on the psychological characteristics and processes that link individuals to their organizations and nations. A recurring theme in these chapters is the psychological dynamic that arises as people try to reconcile their motivations, commitments, and identities with the organizational and national contexts that they inhabit. In Part III, the discussion turns to social psychological and sociological approaches to the complexity that cultural considerations add to the various interpersonal and group process issues that occur in organizations. Whereas chapters in the preceding sections include both comparative and intercultural topics, the chapters in Part IV deal specifically with intercultural issues in managing multinational organizations. The topics selected for each section are those that are currently represented by substantial bodies of international management research.

The chapters not only represent different topics, but also entail the authors’ different viewpoints on national culture, social science theory, and research methods. In the four chapters that comprise the present section, we seek to complement this diversity of views and topics by providing a framework which gives coherence both to the present arrangement of chapters and to the broader field of contemporary cross-cultural management research.

The Essence of Culture: Systems of Values, Beliefs, and Meanings

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The central focus of this Handbook concerns culture, so we begin by reviewing some key issues faced by researchers into cross-cultural aspects of management. The earliest approaches to conceptualization of culture stressed that cultures were integral social systems. However, importing the concept into the domain of management studies has entailed a substantial change of emphasis. Anthropological analyses that first drew attention to the significance of cultural systems emphasized the ancient, isolated, preliterate groups least affected by the unique pattern of industrialization that began in the late 18th century in Europe. A frequent purpose was to point out idiosyncrasies and even dysfunctions of Western societies that contrasts with nonindustrial societies make apparent (e.g., Mead, 1954). However, the study of more contemporary systems drew more heavily from sociology and psychology and, correspondingly, tended to study the evolution and nature of nations and of industrial organizations. Therefore, when organizational scholars became interested in the insights that could be achieved by taking a systemic view of nations and organizations, a few followed the methods of anthropology (e.g., Hall, 1966), but most attempted to adapt methods and findings from sociology and psychology to the cultural topics and language of anthropology (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2006). Particularly important to this adaptation was the linking of the psychological concept of values and the technology of questionnaire surveys to the problem of how to conceptualize and represent cultural groups.

Since values are central to both individual- and nation-level approaches to culture, a discussion of values must distinguish their individual from their nation-level meaning before connecting the two levels. From a cognitive perspective, values are dimensions that summarize a person’s beliefs about the valences associated with objects, symbols, events, behaviors, and outcomes. They are reflected in personal judgments such as good versus bad, right versus wrong, worthwhile versus worthless, and important versus unimportant. From a societal perspective, values comprise dimensions that summarize qualities of social norms. Norms about what a national culture treats as acceptable or desirable can be inferred from what is modeled, rewarded, and punished in social structures like families as well as in community authority structures, particularly legal systems and their enforcement, and in practices such as commerce (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961).

It was not initially clear how best to tap norms through the use of survey methods. However, Hofstede’s (1980, 2001) landmark analysis of national cultures provided a powerful breakthrough. His concise formulation of culture as “the collective programming of the mind” retained anthropologists’ emphasis on culture as something that is shared between many, but proposed to access it through surveying large numbers of individuals. The key innovation in his method was to aggregate measures of individuals’ endorsements of particular values within each of a series of nations. For instance, among other items, his survey included 22 concerning the importance of various work goals. When analyzed at the level of individuals, subsets of these goals were correlated in ways that reflect something of the structure of Maslow’s (1954) need hierarchy. When the same individual items were first aggregated within nations and then factor analyzed, their measurement structure was quite different, reflecting instead what Hofstede labeled as the individualism-collectivism and masculinity-femininity dimensions. This transition from an individual-level conceptualization to a nation-level one came about in two ways. The first step was the innovation of relying not on individual-level measurement structures to represent psychological values, but on the degree of association between different values at the nation level to construct indicators of societal values. The second step was to validate these results based not on relationships with other individual-level measures but on relationships with other nation-level indicators. A nation-level analysis assumes that the configuration of frequently endorsed values in a nation gives one a window on the ways in which most members of a nation will interpret and evaluate what goes on around them.

Since Hofstede’s initiative, it has frequently been assumed that aggregations or configurations of values provide the optimal basis for the characterization of national cultures, although we have recent evidence that nations can also be characterized in terms of aggregated sets of beliefs (Bond et al., 2004). Both values and beliefs can be expressed in a manner that does not refer to any particular context, and the meanings imputed to them may, therefore, vary less between nations than do the meanings of behaviors. The same behavior can take on quite different meaning within differing contexts. For instance, the actions of a manager who makes sustained eye contact with others, or who asks others to participate in a decision, will be interpreted in rather different ways in different national cultures (e.g., Smith, Misumi, Tayeb, Peterson, & Bond, 1989). Through a series of separate individual-level analyses in more than 60 nations, Schwartz (1992) and Schwartz and Sagiv (1995) have shown which of the values in Schwartz’s survey instrument (discussed later) have globally consistent meanings and which do not.

Dimensions of National Culture

Defining culture in terms of value orientations allowed the construction of dimensions that map the cultural domain of nations. Among the many that have been developed, three maps of national cultures that have a heritage in values research are currently influential within the field of cross-cultural management research (Hofstede, 2001; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004; Schwartz, 2004). These are based on the dimensions provided by Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences model, the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) project, and the Schwartz Value Survey. Since these maps draw from questionnaire data about values collected from individuals, they have all needed to respond to the issue of whether individual-level value data can usefully be aggregated to represent nations. Hofstede’s dimensions of individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity-femininity are well-known, particularly the first of these, and research based on them has been reviewed extensively (Hofstede, 2001; Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006). His identification of a further dimension of long-term orientation, based on the study by Chinese Culture Connection (1987), has so far proved less influential.

The GLOBE group of researchers drew heavily on Hofstede’s concepts in formulating their dimensions of national and organizational culture (House et al., 2004). Dimensions labeled as collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance were all included. However, these were measured using different items and House et al. argued that it is useful to differentiate separate dimensions. For example, collectivism was subdivided into dimensions labeled as in-group collectivism and institutional collectivism. Hofstede’s masculinity-femininity dimension was formulated by GLOBE separately in terms of two dimensions labeled as assertiveness and humane orientation.

The measurement methods used by the GLOBE researchers also differed substantially from those used in the Hofstede project. Some respondents were asked to describe societal norms by rating how others in my society behave (termed as the practices measure), while others described their own values by rating how others in my society should behave (termed as the values measure). Correlations between relevant nation-level scores from the Hofstede and GLOBE surveys varied considerably from positive to negligible to negative. They also differed for the GLOBE measures of perceived societal norms and of managers’ own values. Some of the differences between the findings of these two major surveys of business employees are likely to be due to the ways in which the questions were phrased. Hofstede’s respondents described their own values. There may be merit in each of these ways of sampling national culture, but it should not be surprising that they yield different culture maps (Smith, 2006).

In addition to the work influenced by Hofstede’s dimensions, the tradition of value surveys has drawn heavily on a theoretical perspective and set of measures developed in the United States by Rokeach (1973). Some cross-cultural management researchers have used the Rokeach Value Survey directly (e.g., Lenartowicz & Johnson, 2003), but the more influential use of his project has been that developed by Schwartz and his colleagues. Schwartz (1994) adapted, augmented, and reconceptualized Rokeach’s items in collaboration with colleagues in a broad range of nations, yielding separate measures of individual- and nation-level values. His surveys were conducted with students and schoolteachers in many nations. Schoolteachers were sampled on the basis that they provide one of the major sources of value transmission from one generation to the next. The maps derived from these two sets of samples correlated well, suggesting that they also have relevance to other populations such as business employees.

When the data were analyzed at the individual level, Schwartz and Sagiv (1995) found 10 separate clusters of value types in most nations. These were labeled as security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, conformity, and tradition. Huang (Chapter 5) explains the relationship between values such as these and the constructs typically used in content theories of motivation. When the same set of Schwartz’s data were analyzed after the items had been aggregated to the nation level, they produced seven nation-level value types—hierarchy, embeddedness, harmony, egalitarian commitment, intellectual autonomy, affective autonomy, and mastery (Schwartz, 1994).

In some instances, values that define a particular individual-level value type are also reflected in the same nation-level value type. For example, the four values in the nation-level value type called affective autonomy are also part of the two closely linked individual-level value types of hedonism and stimulation. In other instances, the nation-level construct does not correspond closely to one at the individual level. For instance, at the individual level, respondents who endorse authority as a value do not also endorse humility, but at the nation level, nations where authority is frequently endorsed are the same nations as those in which humility is frequently endorsed. By providing separate individual- and nation-level indices of values, Schwartz has simplified the choices faced by researchers.

At the nation level, Schwartz summarized his seven value types in terms of three dimensions. He contrasted values favoring embeddedness with values favoring autonomy, distinguishing between intellectual autonomy and affective autonomy. This contrast correlates with individualism-collectivism scores from other surveys (Schwartz, 1994). Next, he identified hierarchy values as contrasted with egalitarian values. This parallels earlier conceptions of power distance. His third dimension focused on mastery versus harmony. This dimension refers to wishes to dominate versus accommodating one’s context. It is less close to dimensions identified earlier, and it does not refer to interpersonal harmony.

Studies linking the dimensions identified by Hofstede, GLOBE, Schwartz, and others to nation-level criteria have confirmed their predictive validity. There is also substantial convergence between the dimensions that have been identified to characterize national cultures, but this does not tell us whether they are the best or the only dimensions on which to rely. Individualism-collectivism has received extensive attention, perhaps because it correlates strongly with national gross domestic product. The other dimensions may prove more relevant for some purposes, as may more recently identified dimensions such as cultural tightness-looseness (the extent to which situations constrain one’s behaviors; Gelfand, Nishii, & Raver, 2006) and those that have been derived from the World Values Survey (Inglehart & Baker, 2000).

The Importance of Distinguishing Levels of Analysis

The dimensional studies of culture have provided valuable indicators of national differences, but they leave some awkward lingering questions. How can one say that nations have values and beliefs? It is individuals that are usually thought of as having values and beliefs. Early discussions of values both by anthropologists such as Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) and by psychologists such as Rokeach (1973) were somewhat casual about the difference between values as individual preferences and values as societal norms. Cross-cultural scholars are now often more careful to distinguish the individual- and national-level meanings of values. For example, Triandis, Leung, Villareal, and Clack (1985) coined the term idiocentric to represent an individual-level analog of nation-level individualism, and allocentric as an individual-level analog of nation-level collectivism. Nevertheless, the potential for controversy remains (e.g., Hofstede, 2002; Spector & Cooper, 2002; Spector, Cooper, & Sparks, 2001). It complicates matters that the individual- and nation-level measures of values are rather often given similar labels (e.g., Brockner et al., 2001; Dorfman & Howell, 1988; Kirkman et al., 2006; Sorrentino, 2005). Numerous different individual-level scales relating to individualism-collectivism have been formulated, many of them comprising a blend of values and self-perceptions (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002; Smith, Bond, & Kagitçibas¸i, 2006).

Confusion between the personal values that individuals themselves endorse and the use of personal values to draw inferences about organizational or national norms continues to occur frequently in the literature. Making a clear distinction between the two rests largely on whether measurement structures are assessed in a way that is consistent with theory that is relevant to the intended level of analysis (Hofstede, 2001; Peterson, in press; Peterson & Castro, 2006; Schwartz, 1994; see also the discussion of multilevel analysis by Leung, Chapter 4). As discussed previously, individual- and nation-level values do sometimes show some conceptual parallels. However, because of differences in the ways that values associate with one another at different levels, in the processes through which they are formed and by which they influence behavior, levels must be distinguished.

Averaged levels of measures that tap the values of individuals (termed citizen scores by Leung & Bond, 2004, and by Smith et al., 2006) are sometimes empirically related to measures that are derived from nation-level correlations among items. However, this relationship cannot be assumed. It would be appropriate to compute citizen scores as a way of summarizing the values of one or more samples in a study whose focus is at the individual level. However, one could only validly compare citizen means where there is evidence that the measures used have a similar individual-level structure within each sample.

The ideas that aspects of national culture can be derived from psychological values and that value dimensions differ depending on the level at which they are constructed have become established in cross-cultural psychology and organizati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• PART I: ORIENTATION
• PART II: LINKS BETWEEN PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS
• PART III: ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES
• PART IV: MANAGING A MULTIPLE-NATION WORKFORCE
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors