Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3 Keys elements:
● Management a Culture
● Role of the global manager
● Global Management challenges
It can be a definition of what represents the culture: food, music, monuments, history,
behavior, frog, tradition, non-verbal language, religion, sports, philosophy, education …
=> Every people have their own definition of culture. It’s something that is share between
people = generation to generation.
Global Definition: “Culture consists of patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting,
acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of
human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists
of traditional ideas and especially their attached values” (Clyde Kluckhohn, 1961).
Working definition of culture is a set of knowledge structures consisting of systems of values,
norms, attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral meaning that are shared by members of a social
group and embedded in its institutions and that are learned from previous generations.
Culture is a different way to share beliefs, norms, … that defines a group of people. It’s not
something that can be modified overnight, it takes time to change a culture.
It could be really anything, for example: way to dress, way to integrate personal belongings
on your desk at work. Everything needs to be understood beforehand, in order to have a
good way of managing your team.
In the video we could only see the artifacts (the top of the iceberg). Then in the second layer,
you understand the values and therefore you understand better the artifacts (the behaviors).
And the third layer is the internal culture and nature of the group.
Culture can be an organisation or a country. Most parts of the culture understand the rule,
what is accepted and what it isn’t.
Example: wash your hand before eating …
Each member of the particular group understands the basic value of why they are doing
some stuff and not some other. Doesn’t mean they all know everything. They accepted it
III. Frameworks
It has been a foundation for several years. They put five questions for a society: this last one
can choose three different possibilities.
With these different questions you can understand what your expectations of your
organization are, if you don’t work on this type of exercise it cannot work properly, and you
would not understand the culture of your environment.
Trompenaar’s Dimensions: someone worked 10 years for this chart. Only pb the data are
privates because lots are confidential so we can only have access to the results.
Working for IBM from 1917 – 1973 = in 50 countries → he collected data from each country
He created these 4 parameters and then a 5e → evaluate the performance of the countries
- Indi
- Power distance = people accept and expect hierarchy. Difference between a leader
and a follower
- Masculinity/femininity not = between male and female = decision base on facts and
logique = decision base more on relationships. Negotiation.
- uncertain avoidance = process with organisation
- long term orientation = 2 types long and short. Short = people prefer living for the
day
Their study yields seven value orientation that are labelled as follows.
● Egalitarianism: recognition of people as moral equals
● Harmony: fitting in harmoniously with the environment
● Embeddedness: people as embedded in the collective
● Hierarchy: unequal distribution of power is legitimate
● Mastery: exploitation of the natural or social environment
● Affective autonomy: pursuit of positive experiences
● Intellectual autonomy: independent pursuit of own ideas
It is an extension of Hofstede work, it’s one of the largest projects ever with 170 researchers
they collected 17000 interviews. They work on the study and create 2 parameters.
Introduce gender egalitarianism = what is the level of equalities = high or low
IV. Social Cognition
Criteria:
Uncertainly SK = 85% et US = 46%
Indulgence = SK = 29 and US = 68
Individualism: SK = 18 and US = 91 (opposite = why Todd has difficulties to understand the
behaviour of Chung)
Power distance: 60 / 40
⇒ The last two are the most important
● If you were in the place of one of the parties – what you would have done differently
- The wording of the sentence
- Should provide better guidance and advice
- Implementation of training to adapt to cultures
- More discussions
Todd:
- Learn more about Korean culture
- Try to solve the issue together in an office
- Explain her in a way that she can understand what went wrong
- Todd wanted to solve the problem but he makes it worse
- He uses his American ways to address the problem = et a recommence = He use the
American way to resolve the dispute
2) 2 interesting theory’s:
Social Cognition
⇒ concept = psychology
How we develop mental representations and how our mental representations influence the
way we process information about people and social events.
These representations are called schemas when they define a category or script when they
contain a behaviour sequence. As human beings we create different categories and then we
describe these categories (script = how we feel about it). What do you think about a word, for
example fish = family holidays for one, food for other, pet for other…? This category can be
based on everything = people, skin colour, smell…
Two types of social cognition, often referred to as type 1 and type 2 cognition (Khaneman
2011).
Type 1: family
Type 2: don’t have an off information = something new.
1991 = Fisher and Taylor says that we can categories human being
1) Person schema =How you describe someone
2) Self-schemas = what is your expectation, behaviour that you like or you expected
from other
3) Role schemas
4) Event-schemas = what did you have / your experience related to the event
Stereotype:
Stereotype is closely related to the idea of schemas and are a categorization of the
characteristics and behaviour of a set of individuals
- resistance to next information
- Stereotypes are complex and difficult to evaluate
- Social dominance
Example: French are lazy, drink wine / Indian love spicy food
Stereotype (limited information) same ideas as categorizing