International intercultural management Assignment

International intercultural management - Assignment Example 2. Hofstede’s Model in Relation to Cultural Aspects Every nation has its own set of standards that define the culture in terms of thinking, being and acting, and these differences have a very strong impact on the business communication and workplace values in any organization. Something that may be considered perfectly normal and natural in an organization of one country can be frowned upon and seen as offensive in another. Values will always differ across cultures. Therefore, we have to understand these varying differences in order to describe and forecast employee behaviour from various countries. Some cultures value decisions that are made in a group, while others think that the leader should take control of the decision-making. For almost all business organizations, it is crucial to be aware of how the cultures will affect the workplace values because it will provide them with a framework of assessing the different dimensions. One of the most determined studies of the cult ural differences and how they influence organizational issues was commenced by Geert Hofstede, a Dutch scholar which involved data on more than 116,000 employees of IBM representing forty countries. Many of these dimensions will be based on Geert Hofstede’s framework for assessing cultures (Brown, 2009). It is important to understand where the values across cultures stem from, or what the source is. Previous research has identified two clear forces that have an impact on the formation of values that managers who are engaged in international business possess (Ronen, 1986; Webber, 1969). These two forces can be categorized into national culture as well as business environment. Both the culture of the nation and the environment the business operates in will have a significant influence on the values that an organization will possess. Triandis et al. (1986) brings forth the proposal that a way to have an understanding of the culture is to identify the dimensions of the variations in the culture of the organization such as Hofstede (1980). In a study including more by Geert Hofstede, it was found out there were four basic dimensions along with work-related values that differed across cultures: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity/femininity, and individualism/collectivism. Later on, work by Bond presented with a fifth dimension i.e. the long-term/short-term orientation. Power Distance is related to the extent to which a culture’s members accept an imbalanced distribution of power. Hofstede’s Power distance Index measures the degree to which the less dominant members of establishments and institutions accept the unequal distribution. This will almost always represent discrimination, but defined from below instead of above. It proposes that a society’s level of variation is recognised by the followers as much as by the leaders. If we look at France, we see that the power distance index is comparatively higher than the rest of the countries; around 68. This means that in the management as well as the general lifestyle of France there is a big gap between the social classes, and there are clear definitions of status involved.