Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior - Soltanieh ...

MAKE MANAGEMENT PRACTICE FIT NATIONAL CULTURES AND THE GLOBAL CULTURE 617
for understanding cross - cultural differences and similarities is becoming increasingly crucial
for effective international partnerships and their managers.
However, recognizing and accepting cultural diversity is necessary, but not suffi cient
for operating across cultural borders. What is needed is a shared meaning system that
enables players in the global work context to communicate and understand each other,
so there is a basis for collaboration and coordination (Gelfand, Erez, and Aycan, 2007 ).
This shared meaning system reflects the emergence of a global work culture. The global
work culture has emerged as the most macro level of culture which subsumes the national,
organizational, group, and individual levels of cultural values nested within each other,
portraying a multi - level model of culture (Erez and Gati, 2004 ), as shown in Model 1,
Figure 33.1 .
THE GLOBAL WORK CULTURE
Social scientists drew attention to the dissemination of three socio - cultural values
around the world: rationalization, professionalization and actorhood (Drori, Jang, and Meyer,
2006 ). Rationalization pertains to systemization, standardization, and routinization of
actions. Rationalization facilitates comparability across cultures, as evident by the global
rating systems of economic, educational, and government institutions. Comparability
enhances global competition across all institutional domains. Organizations compete for
their relative ranking: business companies, as well as national educational systems, universities,
business schools, legal systems, etc. make every effort to be ranked at the top of their
respective world list. Furthermore, rationalization enforces universal criteria for professionalism,
pertaining to universal knowledge, and expertise that are necessary for becoming
a certified professional and a member of local professional organizations, recognized
by international professional organizations. Finally, globalization also diffuses the value of
actorhood, which champions the proactive individual, with the capacity and motivation
for taking a proactive stand and control over him/herself. This value has been globally
disseminated by educating for democracy around the world. Such global values provide
the infrastructure for the development of a global organizational culture, common to all
organizations operating in the global work context.
Values are instrumental for adaptation to and/or changing one ’s environment. The
global work environment is known to be geographically dispersed and culturally diverse,
highly competitive, dynamic, and uncertain. Paradoxically, while this global environment
emerges beyond national cultures it also consists of diverse cultures representing the multiple
subsidiaries and business units of the global organization. Unlike managers operating
in local organizations, nested within one culture, managers of global organizations
operate in a complex environment, where they need to safeguard the global integration of
the companies ’ operations; on the other hand, alongside this global integration, they must
maintain local responsiveness to their diverse subsidiaries and business units, nested within
diverse local cultures. The global context determines the principles that should guide
managers operating in the global work context. Below is a set of subprinciples for the
global manager, as summarized in Figure 33.2 .
As evident, the core principle relates to the interplay between global integration and
local responsiveness (Kostova and Roth, 2002 ).