Cross-Cultural Research

Culture shapes the values, attitudes, and behavior of human beings. In a managerial context cultural differences lead to diverse management activities and processes, which may present barriers to effective decision making and profit orientation in international management. Information and knowledge on cultural differences and their effects on modern management can help overcome these differences and improve and ease business processes.

Cross-cultural research therefore investigates managerial research questions in two or more cultural settings. Cross-cultural management research focuses on comparing management processes in corporations located in different cultures. Its overall aim is to make these differences understandable and allow managers to develop solutions to overcome and bridge cultural differences and challenges in an international business environment.

Cross-cultural research methods can be divided into qualitative and quantitative research methods. Data can either be gathered by getting hold of secondary data sources, which is information that has been collected before, or by collecting primary data, which refers to the researcher conducting his or her own cross-cultural research project to receive the necessary information to answer a specific research question. The main challenges when conducting research in a cross-cultural context are conceptual and functional equivalences of data collected in different cultures.

Culture in International Management Research

Culture is a critical factor in a global economy. While internationalizing, multinational corporations enter markets that differ in economic, legal, political, social, and cultural levels. But whereas economic, legal, and political differences between countries and their citizens can be observed easily, cultural differences between countries are often not so obvious.

Culture can be defined as a set of common values within a certain group or system, which is communicated from older members of the group to younger ones. According to Nancy Adler, culture becomes evident through common values, attitudes, and actions within a group or system. Cultural differences present [Page 443]challenges to perform management processes effectively. In a corporate context, they lead to different managerial actions, different consumer attitudes and buying behavior as well as particular expectations of international negotiation partners, all of which subsequently may lead to misunderstandings or conflict between employees of multinational corporations.

From an international manager's perspective, culture and differences between cultures therefore play an increasingly important role. To avoid mistakes and promote goal-oriented decision making, gaining information on cultural differences and their effect on international management is vital. Cross-cultural research provides this information and refers to any kind of research in which a research question is investigated in two or more different cultures.

The idea of investigating exotic cultures is not new and was originally a research topic of cultural anthropology, a research field that concentrates on culture and involves the investigation of different societies, their cultures and norms. Management studies, on the other hand, has so far not developed a research stream investigating cultures and their particularities from within, but focuses on comparisons between cultures or groups of cultures. This is done through a number of theoretical frameworks on cultural diversity that have been developed.

The most prominent classifications are Hall and Hall's, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's, Hofstede's, and Trompenaar's cultural dimensions. All of these authors distinguish culture across several dimensions. E. T. Hall and M. R. Hall identify cultural differences among the following dimensions: structure of space, structure of time, speed of messages, and context orientation (low-context or high-context). F. Kluckhohn and F. L. Strodtbeck defined six different dimensions and classify cultural differences along time orientation, relation to nature, relations with other people, mode of human activity, space, and belief about basic human nature. The most cited author in this area is Geert Hofstede, who developed the following categories to classify cultures: individualism versus collectivism, power distance, masculinity versus feminity, and uncertainty avoidance.

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