Cross-cultural management discussion

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Research: The Biggest Culture Gaps
Are Within Countries, Not Between
Them
by Bradley Kirkman , Vas Taras and Piers Steel May 18, 2016

When we talk about managing across cultures, we tend to think of the
words “culture” and “country” interchangeably. For example, it is a widely
accepted notion that in Eastern countries like China and Japan, cultural
norms dictate that group harmony takes precedence over individual
recognition and achievement in the workplace, while in Western countries
like the U.S. and Germany, stronger emphasis is placed on individual
accomplishment and performance at work. So, managers refer to
“Japanese culture” or the “American way” of doing things when referencing
work-related beliefs, norms, values, behaviors, and practices. The
assumption that “country equals culture” results in expat managers trying
to do things the Japanese way in Japan, the Brazilian way in Brazil, and so

https://hbr.org/search?term=bradley%20kirkman

https://hbr.org/search?term=vas%20taras

https://hbr.org/search?term=piers%20steel

http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/11/26/314097/index.htm

http://amp.aom.org/content/20/1/67.short?rss=1&ssource=mfc

on.

We challenged this common understanding in a study we recently
published in Management International Review. We used a research tool
called “meta-analysis” (essentially, a study of studies) to analyze 558
existing studies conducted over the last 35 years on work-related values
covering 32 countries from around the world, including the United States,
Brazil, France, South Africa, and China. The four work-related values
addressed the importance people in each country placed on:

1. Individuals vs. groups
2. Hierarchy and status in organizations
3. Having as much certainty as possible at work
4. Material wealth, assertiveness, and competition vs. societal welfare and

harmony in relationships

Using these four work-related values, we found that country is actually a
very poor “container” of culture. We compared the extent of differences on
the values within each country versus the extent of differences between the
countries. If country were a good container of culture, we would expect
fewer within-country differences (i.e., people in each country have similar
shared values), and greater between-country differences (i.e., people in one
country have different values from those in another). Interestingly, we found
the opposite. Specifically, over 80% of the differences on these values were
found within countries, and less than 20% of the differences were found
between countries. One of the reasons for this is decades of immigration
across countries, leading to more diversity of values within countries.

This means two important things. For one, to talk about a “Japanese” or
“American” or “Brazilian” culture leaves a lot of room for error. With such
great differences among work-related values within each country, the
notion that you can generalize about a country’s work culture is just plain
wrong. And two, an American walking down the street in Shanghai is likely
to meet many Chinese people with values closer to his or her own than to

http://amp.aom.org/content/20/1/67.short?rss=1&ssource=mfc

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11575-016-0283-x

an “average” Chinese culture. Assuming that national cultural stereotypes
apply to most individuals in a country simply does not work.

Once we determined that country was a very poor container of culture, we
asked what other potential containers of culture might be superior to
country? In other words, if workplace cultures do not neatly cluster within
national borders, what does determine how they group together? To answer
this question, we compared culture to 17 other possible containers,
including such personal characteristics as gender, age, generation, number
of years of education, occupation, and socio-economic status, and
environment characteristics such as civil and political freedom, economic
freedom, GDP/capita, Human Development Index, Globalization Index, long-
term unemployment, urbanization, income inequality (using the GINI
coefficient), level of corruption, crime rate, and employment in agriculture.
Out of this list, country was only the 15th best (or 3rd worst) container of
culture, with only gender and age cohorts being inferior to country.

Our analysis showed that demographic groupings such as occupation and
socio-economic status were superior to country when capturing similarity in
work-related values between people. What that means is that if you put a
bunch of physicians from different countries together in a room, they are
likely to have more shared work-related values compared to a group of
random people from the same country. And, likewise, people in similar
socio-economic conditions or with similar levels of education would have
more shared values among them than with groups from their birth country.
And political and economic characteristics such as globalization or
economic freedom were all superior to country of origin for predicting
similarity in work-related values. In other words, our data show that it makes
much more sense to talk about cultures of professions, rich versus poor,
free versus oppressed, than about cultures of countries.

Of course, as with all studies, we have to temper our conclusions with
limitations. For example, we examined only four work-related values, not

more general societal values such as the importance of freedom, equality,
or other broad values. And, our work was limited to just 32 countries, which
could affect how applicable our findings are to other parts of the world. But
we view our findings as the initial motivation to move away from the old
“country equals culture” paradigm. After all, some country borders were
arbitrarily drawn based on political considerations and other historical
events. Even though it is simple to refer to “Russian” or “Malaysian” or
“Argentinian” culture, the diversity of values found within each of these
countries makes this an extremely inexact and perhaps an even dangerous
practice.

For those who do business globally, the most important takeaway is never
to assume that people from a particular country embody the values typically
associated with that country. Cultural stereotyping by country will likely lead
to a whole host of mistakes when trying lead and motivate a culturally
diverse workforce.