Management Principles

According to World Culture Report, “Culture shapes the way we see the world. It therefore has the capacity to bring about the change of attitudes needed to ensure peace and sustainable development which, we know, form the only possible way forward for life on planet Earth. Today, that goal is still a long way off. A global crisis faces humanity at the dawn of the 21st century, marked by increasing poverty in our asymmetrical world, environmental degradation and short-sightedness in policy-making. Culture is a crucial key to solving this crisis.”

Why do the people in a group—a corporation, profession or nation—tend to behave in similar, characteristic ways? Why do they respond to situations and approach problems differently than do the people in other groups?

o Cultural differences are seen even between firms in same industry, between occupations that overlap, and between adjacent countries —groups that essentially share the same environment—so cultural patterns are not simply adaptations to different environments.

To understand culture and its role in organizational behavior, researchers have looked at two related problems at different levels of analysis.

• First, what psychological mechanism causes individuals to behave in culturally characteristic ways?

o The most studied psychological mechanism in cross-cultural research has been personal values. These are learned by early socialization. To influence an individual’s thinking, a norm first has to be learned, either induced from everyday observations or imposed by authorities.

o An alternative account emphasizes the role of social norms in carrying cultural patterns. Whereas personal values are beliefs about one’s self, social norms are beliefs about other people.

• Second, how do these processes keep a population behaving in a certain set of ways (even as the individuals in one generation are replaced by a new generation), or, in other cases, generate cultural change over time?

o The first...