Search results

This paper aims to introduce the concept of compassion to the field of international business studies. As international business activities continuously intensify and hence generate a work environment characterized by cultural heterogeneity and pluralism, the notion of compassion in a cross-cultural context can be regarded a key skill for employees in internationally operating firms to enable coping with potential cross-cultural conflicts.

In this narrative-oriented type of review, the authors discuss compassion in a cross-cultural context by drawing on the literature in the management and international business studies. By connecting prior research on compassion with the typical research interests in the IB domain, the authors identify and define potential future research foci for a research agenda centering on the role that cross-cultural compassion plays.

The authors argue that the conventional approach to learning about other national cultures, their value and norm systems, needs to be complemented by the acquisition of compassion skills. In todays culturally diverse business environment where employees increasingly work in virtual teams, cultural complexity is hardly manageable alone by developing expert knowledge about respective cultural contexts to prevent cross-cultural conflicts.

By drawing on extant research on compassion conducted in neighboring disciplines of the social sciences, the authors conceptualize compassion in the context of international business research. Because compassion in a cross-cultural context is new to international business research, this study suggests directions for future research consisting of four research streams to guide future research on compassion in a cross-cultural context in international business studies.

When analyzing modes of navigating a multi-cultural environment in a multinational corporation (MNC), most studies employ an etic approach that delineates how, for example, multi-cultural companies thrive and maneuver in a likewise multi-cultural business contexts. This approach implies the use of theoretical models and empirical observations that from a methodological view identify an employee as either an objectified agent or as an anonymous “other,” indicating that such approaches are rooted in an ethnocentric academic tradition. Acknowledging the merits of this tradition, we take the methodological approach a step further and introduce an emic or contextualized approach that makes employees themselves provide the bulk of data on how and why they position themselves in a multi-cultural organization the way they do. The main objective of this chapter is thus to discuss how employees develop personal strategies to navigate in a complex multi-cultural organization. The study takes off by developing a theoretical model for how to approach emic studies and then proceeds to suggest a methodological approach that is capable of providing empirical data for a model based on a combination of both etic and emic approaches. This constitutes a first step towards developing a generic model of how to deal with context. In order to test the model, the empirical focus will be on the relationship between the headquarter of the Danish MNC, Maersk Line, in Denmark and its subsidiaries in Asia. This relationship is analyzed on the basis of interviews in the Danish headquarter and in the local offices in Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, and Penang.