Salz Review - Wall Street Journal

Salz Review
An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices
178
‘Culture’ is a human construct that applies to collective activity. It is the social and
unwritten rules with regard to how people in groups interact; the collective habits. Culture
is built through interactions between people in groups. Cultural studies have their roots in
understanding how to help people who have different societal origins interact to get things
done. Early anthropologists recognised that while some differences between people from
different cultures were observable and describable, these differences were rarely sufficient
to really know how work gets done. Understanding culture is a way of smoothing out how
people in groups can get work done while feeling socially at ease in the group.
Culture is best understood by thinking of the levels at which culture can be experienced.
National (macro-cultures), organisational cultures and, other sub-cultures such as industry
(or professional) cultures are evident and prominent in our lives. Of these cultural levels,
national cultures are the most studied and readily understood. Most people still live their
lives in in a single national culture, and as part of that culture they develop shared patterns
of thinking, responding to and interpreting the stimuli that they encounter. These patterns
become hardwired such that ways of interacting are guided by basic, unwritten, unspoken
assumptions generated through years of shared social interaction and learning.
National cultures are prominent and enduring such that comparisons of organisations
based in the same country of origin have been shown consistently to share fundamental
underlying value systems which are deeply rooted in the history and evolution of the
nation. The national cultural identities are more evident and consistent as driving forces
than industry-wide or organisational-specific cultures.
In the model of global universal banking, the question arises whether it is possible to have
one organisational culture given that employees have such widely varying national cultures
in an organisation offering such different services (retail, corporate, investment banking)?
Research efforts have doubled over the last three decades to find ways to define notable
differences between national cultures in the hope that it might help us to understand how
to predict the challenges we might face when bringing together those who have different
cultural origins. The GLOBE Study is one of the most comprehensive studies of culture to
date. 261 GLOBE studied culture in 62 societies and in three global industries (financial
services, telecommunications and food), seeking to answer questions such as:
― Do global industries have identifiable cultures that supersede national cultures?
― Do different national cultures recognise and require different leadership styles?
― Is it possible to reliably define national cultures in a way which helps define
different interventions that might help to bring two organisations from different
country origins together?
The research identified nine cultural dimensions by which national cultures can be reliably
compared (see Figure B.1) and seven positive attributes of good leadership that stood the
test across all 62 societies:
― Integrity – good leaders can be trusted;
― Generosity – good leaders are helpful;
261 Robert J. House et al., Leadership, Culture and Organisations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, 2004.