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Business relationships: cross-cultural analysis

Sid Lowe Kingston University Sharon Purchase University of Western Australia Maria de Lurdes Veludo Business School Bordeaux ABSTRACT Culture is an important aspect of business relationships and investigation of the impact of culture within relationships is becoming more common within the IMP group of researchers (Fang and Kriz 2000). This research considers whether attitudes towards national culture at the micro-level are consistent with those developed at the macro-level by Hofstede (1980). Data was collected from Hong Kong and Portugal, vastly different in geographical and cultural heritage, but according to Hofstede (1980) similar in the cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism and power distance. The attitudes displayed by the micro-level actors did indicate national cultural characteristics were consistent with Hofstede (1980) in some cases giving partial support to the research propositions. The effect of organizational culture within the Portuguese case, strongly influenced attitudes of the actors and in the individualism/collectivism cultural dimension were not consistent with that expected from the ranking given by Hofstede (1980). INTRODUCTION Cultural understanding is a key issue in the development of cross-cultural relationships and is one of the major issues facing multi-national organisations both internally within their human resource development and externally with the numerous relationships they develop with buyers and suppliers in many different international countries (Tse, Lee, Vertinsky and Wehrung 1988). Yet, although these issues have been highlighted previously (see Ajiferuke and Boddewyn 1970; Adler 1983; Bhaghat and McQuaid 1982; Smircich 1983) the academic community is still grappling with these contentious issues. With insufficient progress being made towards cultural research, especially cultural studies external to the United States, more research needs to be conducted. This...