Cross Cultural Management Research Assumptions, Evidence, and Suggested

Directions

Clearly, such differences must be taken into account in designing management practices and
strategies. Of these contextual differences, one that has received a great deal of attention and is widely
viewed as an important constraint on management practice is national culture. Hofstede’s development
of national culture scores for countries. Although questions have been raised about the limitations of
using national culture scores such as those provided by Hofstede in cross cultural and management
research , the continued widespread use of such national scores suggests their continued general
acceptance and impact.

One of the reasons why national culture has received so much attention is because it is hypothesized to
be a constraint on management practice and organization culture . In this vein, Hofstede claimed that
management is ‘culturally dependent’ and that effective organizations have ‘adapt foreign management
ideas to local cultures’ . Although Hofstede recognizes that it is possible for multinationals to differ from
the national culture , he notes that this is difficult and that it is usually advisable to instead adapt to the
local culture. Another example of the continued influence of Hofstede’s cultural dependence hypothesis
can be found in a recent paper by Johns on organization culture.

Based to a large extent on Hofstede’s work, Johns states that ‘national culture constrains variation in
organizational cultures’ and that because of this and other constraints, organizations have less room to
differentiate their cultures than sometimes believed. In this article, my goal is to examine the logic and
statistical evidence that has been used to provide the rationale for the hypothesized importance and
constraining influence of national culture in management. The present article is organized around a
review of these assumptions and relevant evidence, followed by specific suggestions for the design and
execution of future research on cross cultural management.

Country A

Example given by Hofstede . Although conceptually related, d and Cohen’s f differ in their interpretation
because Cohen’s f gives the average difference across groups from the grand mean of groups in
standard deviation units. As such, Cohen’s f will be smaller than d. Cohen has suggested benchmarks for
characterizing the magnitude of these effect sizes.

As noted, Hofstede did not address effect size in this way, nor have most others conducting cross
cultural research.
Grand Mean of All Countries
A second way Hofstede dealt with the question of within-country versus between-country variance was
to use an example early in his book of what two different country distributions of individual level
cultural values might look like. Although Hofstede’s Figure 1.5 seems to acknowledge the existence of
withincountry variance, his example significantly understates the size of within-country variance relative
to between-country variance. In his example, the two national culture means differ by 1.0 standard
deviation. Others have used similar examples, thus implying similarly large country effect sizes.

Indeed, the% variance explained by country can be converted into Cohen’s f to more easily see the
magnitude of country differences in standard deviation units. 150 to show the magnitude of the actual
difference of the average country in Hofstede’s dataset from the grand mean of all countries in his
dataset.

Gerhart and Fang such as the

The effect size of country at the individual and organization levels, while not expected to be the same, is
expected to be related, if it is accepted that differences in individual level characteristics of
organizational members do, to some degree, translate into organization level differences in
culture . Gerhart examined the evidence on this question of organization level differences based on two
large-scale multi-country studies that measured organization culture. First, they used cluster analysis to
derive organization culture profiles for each country. Next, they determined the degree to which
organization culture conformed to the national culture profile for the country where the organization
was located.

They reported that the majority of organizations had a culture that was not isomorphic with the national
culture. Gerhart additionally computed the effect size for country in their study and found that, on
average across culture dimensions, country culture in their data, a small effect size. Further, as noted
below, the country effect is not the national culture effect but rather an upper bound on it. Although not
explicitly stated in Gerhart and Fang as an assumption, researchers have long been guilty of acting as
though a country effect demonstrates a national culture effect.
In 1982, Bhagat and McQuaid observed that ‘culture has often served simply as a synonym for nation .
 CASES IN CRITICAL CROSS-CULTURAL

This book is a collection of 16 empirical cases in critical Cross-Cultural Management. All cases approach
culture in CCM beyond national cultures, and all examine power as an integrative part of any cross-
cultural situation. The cases also consider diversity in the sense of culturally or historically learned
categorizations of difference, and acknowledge how diversity categories might differ across
cultures. Mainstream CCM often limits itself to comparative models or cultural dimensions.

Considering the intersections of culture, diversity and power enables students, researchers and

practitioners alike to see ‘more’ or ‘different’ things in the situation, and then to come up with novel
approaches and solutions that do justice to the realities of culture and diversity in today’s management
and organizations. Her research interest is cross-cultural management, gender and diversity and
organizational theory. Laurence Romani is Associate Professor at the Stockholm School of
Economics, Sweden.

Hamid Foroughi is Senior Lecturer in organization studies at the University of

His PhD thesis from Henley Business School, on collective memory and mnemonic politics, received the
best critical dissertation award of the 2015 Academy of Management meeting in Vancouver.

Emanuela Girei
Emanuela Girei is a lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Sheffield Management
School, United Kingdom. Her main area of research is management, politics and social change, focusing
in particular on whether and how management theory and practice can contribute to making
organizations, institutions and societies more just, equitable and sustainable.

Qahraman Kakar
He earned a BSc in political science and economics from Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan, and
completed his MSc in development economics and international project management at University
Paris-Est Créteil, France. His research interests include cross-cultural management, conf licts and social
fragmentation.

Anders Klitmøller is Associate Professor at the Department of Language and

Taking an ethnographic approach, his current research applies a practice perspective on ref lexivity and
power in organizations. Her research interests include diversity management, leadership
development, intersectionality, trust, practice theory, and intercultural competence and cultural
intelligence. Stemming from an interdisciplinary background in international business, cultural
anthropology, and languages and area studies, her research, publications and editorial work span critical
cross-cultural and human resource management.