Organizational Psychology in Cross Cultural Perspective

3 Culture and Organizations

Culture and Organizations Cultural differences are important variables in understanding social and organizational behavior (Leung and Bond, 1984). Culture is such an important determinant of behavior that it has been proposed that it be included when psychological theories are constructed (Triandis, 1976). However, given that we accept that culture is important, we still need to define what the concept of culture encompasses. There are unique methodological issues that arise in research on cultures. For example, as mentioned in the last chapter, cultural differences exist in the way that people respond to questionnaires and surveys. In addition, sample size takes on added importance if there are many individual differences within a culture. Because of these and other issues, individual and cultural differences require distinct approaches if we are to understand how culturalvariation patterns affect behavior. The identification of cross-cultural differences based on an analysis at either the individual or cultural level alone is not a sufficient focus in cross-cultural research; cultural differences need to be considered at both levels (Leung, 1989). Several important aspects of cross-cultural management are influenced by cultural differences. For example, consumer preferences are often dictated by cultural values, where culture generally refers to the culture of a country. Researchers and theorists in organizational behavior have introduced the idea that organizational culture plays an important role in various aspects of an organization’s daily life. Cultural values influence managerial and employee perceptions of their environment, expectations , and individual behavior. If people, even in the same organization, have different assumptions, then they will see events and react to them differently (Sims and Gioia, 1986). People from different cultures approach problems differently and have different ways to resolve and apply solutions to problems (Abramson, Lane, Nagai, and Takagi, 1993). When there are many cultural differences in an organization, there is a 3 24 greater need to seek out suitable forms of cooperation (Olie, 1994). By being aware of cultural differences, managers and organizations can reduce the probability of failure when operating outside their home culture (Tung, 1987). In the age of multinational organizations, the issue of organizational versus national culture is a complex and important one to consider. If a company has an organizational culture in one country (e.g., Japan), what happens when that company creates an operation in the United States? Will the organizational culture or the national culture dominate? If national culture is the critical variable, will it be the home or host culture that influences organizational behavior the most? The home-country culture and values are significant environmental factors for the company. If all of the companies being considered as part of a study operate within a single country, then it is reasonable to assume that the national culture is consistent across all the companies, while the organizational culture may differ between companies. A unique situation occurs in multinational companies (MNCs). If a company brings to a new country an organizational culture that is clearly different from the national culture of the host country, problems may result. A company such as IBM has an organizational culture that was established in the United States, which it tends to impose on subsidiaries in other countries at the expense of local differences in an attempt to maintain control and equivalency of operations (Peters and Waterman, 1982). While it can be argued that this approach appears to have worked for IBM, it is not universally effective. For example , numerous Western companies operating branches in China have encountered problems, and a high percentage of joint ventures fail. Relatedly , sometimes managers behave in different ways when interacting with others from their own country than they might with managers from other countries. In other words, their cross-cultural and intracultural behaviors may be the same when they should be different or different when they should be the same (Adler and Graham, 1989). What Is Culture? How culture should be defined is open to debate. In addition, there is considerable confusion in the literature about what the constructs of both organizational and national culture mean. There are two primary approaches to understanding and describing culture (Peng, Peterson, and Culture and Organizations | 25 Shyi, 1991). One approach looks at the meaning of artifacts and behaviors within a given culture. This approach, called the emic approach, is culture specific. The second approach, called the etic approach, is culture general in that it...