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Impact of Cultural Differences on Corporate Strategies of Multinational Firms

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Introduction

Culture is extremely powerful. The rules of the game, what behavior is ethical and accepted, the mood of the organization, and the enthusiasm of employees are all contained in the culture. So, culture can be a powerful, hidden asset or it can be a liability - a time bomb waiting to go off. If your leadership team has not pro-actively created a corporate culture to support the company's purpose, then chances are that the culture is a hidden liability.
Every business has its own character which is unique and called corporate identity. It has one major part, corporate culture, often described as the “personality of an organization”. In that case multinational firms play a major role in this, as knowing how to communicate
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The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world. Masculinity (MAS) versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women's values differ less among societies than men's values; (b) men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values. Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; it ultimately refers to man's search for Truth. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize
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