Search results

Barriers to cultural adaptability include perceptual, interpretive, and evaluative biases. Differences in culturally based perceptual patterns can be problematic given that interpretation and evaluation of behavior is a critical element of teamwork. Altogether, perceptual patterns are “selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate” (Adler, 1986, p. 54). Selective exposure, selective attention, and selective retention are all hallmarks of the process of perception. Bagby (1970) demonstrated how perceptual patterns become selective even in childhood. He had American and Mexican children watch a bullfight and a baseball game simultaneously using a tachistoscope. When asked what they had seen, the American children claimed to have watched a baseball game, and the Mexican children claimed to have watched a bullfight. Neither group was aware that they had been presented two stimuli simultaneously. Both groups of children selected stimuli that had meaning for their culture and ignored or forgot the stimuli that had no meaning for them. The children's culture predisposed them to notice some things and not others. Perceptual selectivity is a key barrier to cultural adaptability and influences both interpretation and evaluation.

Purpose and need for study: This study examines whether or not culture has a strong influence on the digitalisation of public services, including the adoption of an electronic tax system. The literature analysed made us consider the differentiation between developed and developing countries.

Methodology: To test the nexus between culture and digital public services (DPS), this study highlights the impact of culture, from various dimensions, on e-government in European Union member countries, over the period 2014–2018. Accordingly, the analysis proposes a methodological approach on multiple regression analysis, a method widely used in the social sciences for modelling and analysing several variables presumed to be in a relationship. Given that electronic taxation has no explicit index, but electronic government focusses on how effectively and efficiently government services are delivered to citizens and businesses, the proposed research employs the DPS indicator, part of the composite index of Digital Economy and Society Index. The independent variables employed in the study refer to the six dimensions of the national culture from Hofstede.

Findings: Empirical results reveal that cultural dimensions such as uncertainty avoidance, power distance and masculinity are significantly influencing the efficiency of e-government, carrying a negative influence for the sample of EU member states. Accordingly, a more developed e-government system is expected from countries presenting lower values of the three cultural dimensions. When analysing the sub-samples consisting of developed versus developing countries, results indicate better DPS for societies concerned for short-term gratification and spending (based on a negative influence from the long-term orientation dimension). Specific to developed economies and Northern countries was the fact that e-government is positively influenced by more individualistic societies, and by societies that require rigid codes of conduct and structured circumstances.

Practical implications: The practical contribution of this study is the provision of an extensive overview of the relationship between culture and DPS that could serve as useful information for researchers and practitioners, governments and e-government stakeholders.

This paper discusses national differences in the interpretation of time in mixed motive decision contexts, such as negotiation. Specifically, we consider how members of different national cultures (Portugal, Turkey, and the United States) experience temporality in these situations. We argue that cultural temporality such as polychronicity, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance form part of a broader national environment. The national environment is also expressed in national stability factors such as legal systems, family ties, and homogeneity of populations. We propose that temporality and stability aspects of national environment determine negotiation paradigms, which subsequently influence temporality in negotiations. We conclude by suggesting that inclusion of complex and interdependent national environment factors in the study of negotiation has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of mixed motive decision situations.

In this chapter, we propose that society- and organization-level social context cues influence the endorsement of ethical leadership. More specifically, we propose that certain organizational culture values provide proximal contextual cues that people use to form perceptions of the importance of ethical leadership. We further propose that specific societal culture values and societal corruption provide a set of more distal, yet salient, environmental cues about the importance of ethical leadership. Using data from Project GLOBE, we provide evidence that both proximal and distal contextual cues were related to perceptions of four dimensions of ethical leadership as important for effective leadership, including character/integrity, altruism, collective motivation, and encouragement.

The paper displays the cultural profile of the Russian management and explores the different roles of factors linked to the history of Russia and current transition to market and democracy. It further develops interpretation of empirical data collected through the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research project. The survey of managers of multinational companies doing business in Russia tests the cultural profile of the Russian management and confirms the behavioral advantages (visible In-group and Institutional Collectivism) and disadvantages (low Uncertainty Avoidance and Assertiveness) of this culture.

We develop a new look on leadership for innovation and propose that effective leaders alternate between a broad range of behaviors and tune their approach to the changing demands of innovation. This is referred to as ambidextrous leadership. As the importance of different leader behaviors varies not only across time but also across contexts, ambidextrous leadership takes different shapes depending on contextual conditions. We discuss culture as an important contextual condition that holds implications for effective ambidextrous leadership. Cultures have different strengths and weaknesses for innovation that can be leveraged or compensated. We use the cultural characteristics identified by the GLOBE project to discuss how leaders can take culture into account when leading for innovation.

To date, limited studies have examined the country-specific social institutions to explain the informal entrepreneurial activities of women, particularly, within the context of the Middle East. This research paper attempts to close this gap through identifying the contextual and personal factors of domestic informal female entrepreneurs (DIFE) within the context of Turkey as a representative case of the Middle East region. The chapter takes national culture as the external context to identify the informal institutions that shape women's informal entrepreneurial activities and uses the Globe Project cultural dimensions to describe the sociocultural context. The qualitative research presented here was conducted with 38 DIFEs who participated in an EU-funded project in Turkey.

The profile of the informal domestic female entrepreneur reflects a middle-aged woman, married with children, literate with a low-level education and a necessity-type entrepreneur at the beginning who gradually evolves into a pull-type sociocultural entrepreneur in time. The findings show that, the perceived sociocultural environment can be categorized as a socially supportive culture – SSC (Hayton and Cacciotti, 2013, p. 713) which is one of the facilitators of informal entrepreneurial activities and creates a fertile and socially legitimized ground for the informal commercial activities of women in Turkey.

Managing diversity requires an understanding of culture. The majority of businesses have realised that competitiveness no longer stems from formal organisational structures but rather from the mindsets, competencies, and functioning of individuals who create, develop, and support the organisation and who frequently come from different cultural backgrounds. Understanding the essence of a culture, its components, variations, and how all these things effect the business and the managerial process is very beneficial for international managers. Businesses in global value chains need cross-cultural management practices to obtain a competitive advantage. Global value chains make it possible to benefit from the comparative advantages of other nations, and without cross-cultural management, these multinational corporations would be unable to carry on with their business operations. Although there are many explanations on global value chains in the literature, there is no study on the effect of different cultures in value chain management and how different cultures can be managed in global value chains.

In this chapter, the definition of the concept of culture, which is comprehensive and crucial in managing differences, will be depicted. Then, the concept of cross-cultural management will be emphasised and what cross-cultural management means and why and to what extent it is important will be explained. In addition, the impact of cross-cultural management in the inclusive global value chain will be discussed, emphasising the value chain analysis, how it emerged, its basic concepts, and its importance in the international context.

Cultural differences are often important motivators for tourism, but they may also be associated with increased risk perceptions. Different cultures may also perceive risk differently. Despite the importance of this topic for tourism research, few studies have aimed to systematize literature on cultural differences, tourism and risk. Therefore, the main goal of the present chapter is to elaborate a bibliometric analysis of this literature, more specifically, to quantify its sources and clusters of co-citation and terms. To achieve this goal, the publications indexed in Web of Science with the terms cultural differences and tourism (242) are analysed using VOSviewer. A qualitative analysis of the studies which focus specifically on risk is also performed.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the design of culturally appropriate training and development (T&D) strategies for enhancing the performance of employees and organizations, using a learning style approach. We provide an example of African countries and use the results of a review of studies on African cultural values and management to discuss learning styles and T&D. The underlying premise is that T&D strategies are only effective when they are designed to fit with the cultural context. Based on Experiential Learning Theory (ELT, Kolb, 1984; 2014), the chapter reviews the Kolb (1984, 2014) learning model as a basis for designing T&D programs and applies this model using the African results. Given the limited number of studies on Kolb's learning styles cross-culturally, we suggest avenues for further research.