Strategic Alliance Management

Introduction

In the study of international business management and cross-cultural communication, the problems of cultural differences occur inevitably. Because culture contains variables such as knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom (Tylor 1881), attempts of measuring and comparing cultures seems to be meaningful.

There are two overwhelming studies on culture dimensions. One is Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, and the other is the Chinese Values Survey. Comparison will be made between these two studies after a general outline of the Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension. The differences of employees in regard of individualism/Collectivism and Long-Term Orientation/Short-Term Orientation and how it impact international management and leadership style in the workplace will also be assessed.

Discussion of the Issues

Outline Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Based on the survey of IBM employees, Hofstede innovatively created a Five Culture Dimension system and provided a quantitative model to access people’s distinction among cultural and organizational discipline(Hofstde 1984). Power Distance (PDI), Individualism and Collectivism (IDV), Masculinity and Femineity (MAS) and Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) were known as Hofstede’s Four Culture Dimension at the earlier stage of his research. Later after adopted Bond’s Chinese Values Survey, Hofstede supplements the fifth dimension, Long-Term Orientation (LTO). Firstly, PDI interprets the stage of inequality, the power of authority and the importance of hierarchy among organizations including families, tribes, academic institutions, enterprises and communities (Clearly Cultural n.d.). As a multi-source consequence, the power distance level impacts the society persistently meanwhile performances in relationships between predecessors-descendants, supervisors-subordinates, authorities-citizens and even doctors-patients. Secondly, people with high stage of IDV are construed to consider themselves or objectives related to individuals rather than defining themselves as affiliations to groups. Typically, clustering is a general phenomenon in low IDV culture that people tend to collaborate with others from similar backgrounds while nuclear family is more common in high IDV culture. Thirdly, MAS was raised by Hofstede to indicate whether a culture is comparatively aggressive or opposite. Last dimension for the nascent theory is Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), indicating that how people feel, whether anxious, sentimental, impatient, active and self-disciplinal or calm, relaxed and unhurried towards uncertainty. Detailed explanation of the fifth dimension would be introduced when comparing CVS and Hofstede’s Cultural theory. These five dimensions can function not merely individually but also cooperatively (Hofstede 1991)

Comparison between Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension and Chinese Values Survey People evaluated Hofstede’s Five Culture Dimensions and Bond’s Chinese Values Survey as similar research and can be utilized complementarily. To compare the framework of Hofstede’s Five Culture Dimension and CVS, first of all, the CVS’s four influential factors can draw a parallel with the initial four dimensions of Hofstede’s culture theory so that they are supplements to each other. CVS 1 named Integration influenced by how people in the survey acknowledge the relationship between individual and groups and authority and equality. In the Chinese Culture Connection (1987), professions revealed the coherence between CVS1 and PDI. Also, drawn from Franke et al. (1991), there are approximately 40% of figures for Integration from CVS coincided with PDI statistics from Hofstede. Similarly, CVS2 basically relates to Uncertainty Avoidance while factor 2 in CVS, Personal Morality vs. success resembles to IDV. Simultaneously, CVS3 Human-Heartedness supplements the MAS of Hofstede’s theory (The Chinese Culture Connection 1987). Nevertheless, there was no such a dimension could satisfy CVS4 - Confucian Work Dynamism (Later adopted by Hofstede as the fifth dimension named Long-Term Orientation) in Hofstede’s initial theory invention. Franke et al. (1991) was then against Hofstede’s statement about the independency between Confucian Work Dynamism and Individualism. Instead, he was confident that there is a strong correlation between these two variables. However, Yeh & Lawrence (1995) rebutted with critique on the small scale of data used by Franke et al. Indeed, what Confusion Work Dynamism differs from Hofstede’s is that the former one displayed correlation positively with economic growth while the latter one displayed negatively. Referring to the CVS statics, regions with high score of CONDYN such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan who encountered incredible economic growth then demonstrated the positive correlation. This sparkling finding evoked Hofstede’s attention and made efforts to expand its initial cultural dimensions from 4 items to 5 (Minkov & Hofstede 2010).

Leadership and management in Individualism/Collectivism Hofstede’s Five Culture Dimensions has a tremendous practical significance in international management within organizations where there are employees from multiple cultures (Triandis 2004). Employees, as vital internal participants, their cultural issue is granted as a focal point of multi-cultural management and leadership. It is inevitable that there are employees originate from different cultures, especially in multi-national enterprises,

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