The Marketing Segment Of The Discipline

International marketing or business is uniquely different from the local market because the product price, place and promotion is vastly different from what is been offered to local customers (Johansson, 2000) With the emergence of the information technology, cross border marketing has never been a distant dream. However, it has never been easier even for giant multinational companies to face challenges that come in international business. The biggest challenge comes from the culture which varies from country to country.

Every country differs in culture which has been there for centuries. The international market is growing rapidly, with more and more multinational organisations entering new markets each day. In this assignment I will evaluate how the difference in cultures affects the performance of international businesses.

Halsall, R., 2008. From ‘business culture’ to ‘brand state’: conceptions of nation and culture in business literature on cultural difference. Culture and Organization, volume 14 (1), page 15-30.

Introduction: There are around 196 countries in the world and the cultures and values differ between the different countries. There are still similarities in some of the culture traits. In today’s world people are more willing to engage in global business and for this reason they need to be able to adapt to the different cultures. As the cultures vary from country to country, people around the world may face many difficulties during their communication. Many businesses have failed due to the fact that they failed to fully assess the market they were entering in. The paper will portray three different approaches that will aid in understanding cultural differences that can be utilized as effective tools in conducting global business. These approaches are known as the context approach, the cluster approach and the dimension approach.

The Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research Program, or GLOBE, is an extensive research program devoted to understanding how culture influences leadership and different organizational processes (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, Gupta, 2004, pp. 9). This program consists of three separate phases, the first being an empirical study focused on developing research instruments (House et al., 2004, p. 9). The second phase is primarily geared toward the “assessment of the nine core attributes of societal and organization cultures” which are referred to as cultural dimensions (House et al., 2004, p. 9). And the last phase is currently underway as an investigation of the impact and effectiveness of specific leader styles

If I were the CEO of a multinational corporation in the 21st century, it would be critical for me to develop and employ a cross cultural approach to the leadership in consultation with Hofstede's Five Cultural Dimensions. Though I have prior knowledge of management theories and other examples of Hofstede's work, "Cultural Constraints in Management Theories" (1993) was a welcomed shock and surprise. One of the aspects of the article that struck me the most was the clear demonstration of the singularity of the American style, perspective, and application of management in the workplace. This fact made it abundantly clear to me, that as the CEO of a hypothetical multinational corporation, that it is imperative for the sake of my financial success, professional reputation, and for the sake of all my employees, I must not implement the American style of management as part of the leadership practice.

The Project GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness). The GLOBE research followed in Hofstede 's footsteps yet also searched for additional dimensions (Cater, Lang & Szabo, 2013, p. 446) as depicted and defined on Table II. In light of the GLOBE findings, earlier conceptualisations of culture have been reconsidered with respect to the impact of culture on leadership (Dickson et al., 2012 as cited in Cater et al., 2013, p. 447). GLOBE researchers introduced twnety one first-orderr “primary leadership dimensions” which were then condensed in six second-order “global leadership dimenions” that are charismatic/value-based, team-oreinted, participative, human-oreinted, autonomous, or self-protective (Cater et al., 2013, p. 450).

This report is comparison between Hofstede and GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organisation Behaviour Effectiveness) research on Culture and Leadership. Hofstede and GLOBE is similar, they both investigation the behaviour of organisations in different countries and across culture. But the way and research scope still quite different. In this report we will summarized and reviewed the theoretical dimension of various culture and leadership. Include the deficiencies in Hofstede’s work which the GLOBE study sought to address.

The GLOBE project stands for Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness research project which encompasses quantitative and qualitative methods to discover the findings of how the relationship of organizational culture, leadership and societal culture. This project includes many aspects of ethics and corporate social responsibilities through the way leaders deal with balancing the properties of the financial side of a business and behavioral side. “National cultures are examined in terms of nine dimensions: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, humane orientation, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and gender egalitarianism” (Journal of World Business, 2002. Pp. 3-10). This project involves over 170 researchers from around 61 cultures around the world resulting in the findings of many different forms of leadership; some contributing to ethics and corporate social responsibility and some not.

The real and perceived costs will affect the manager’s perception of the attractiveness of doing business with a party. Cultural distance influences decisions such as market selection for exporting and direct foreign investment (Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul 1975) (Davidson, 1980; Kogut and Singh, 1988). (Dow & Karunaratna, 2006). The influences of other cultures are thereby affecting the way in which information is communicated and interpreted to and from others.

With the unstoppable trend of globalisation, it becomes extremely significant for international businesses to have a thorough understanding of different cultures. Hofstede (1980, pp. 21-23) defines culture as ‘the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from another’. This essay examines Hofstede’s cultural framework and suggests that Hofstede’s cultural framework is an outstanding and authoritative tool to analyze culture differences. In this essay, cultural frameworks will be discussed firstly, following by a discussion of my cultural scores and background. Finally, recommendations on cross-cultural management between China and Australia will be provided.

His definition of culture is “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others” (Hofstede, 2001). These are his six dimensions and how they are relative to leadership. The first dimension is called the Power Distance Index (PDI). This dimension states that the people with less power in the society accept that power and influence is distributed unequally. The lower power members of society want equalization of distribution of power and demand justification. It is imperative for leaders in a global business environment not to be a high power distance leader or a low power distance leader. There needs to be a balance between the two, because you may be leading a diverse team of individuals from different backgrounds and countries. The best way a leader can succeed in this type of situation is to know the team that you are leading and develop flexibility that will motivate the team to follow.

When a business decides to venture internationally into different countries with its products, services, and operations, it is very important that the company gains an understanding of how the culture of the different societies affects the values found in those societies. Geert Hofstede conducted one of the most famous and most used studies on how culture relates to values. Hofstede study enabled him to compare dimensions of culture across 40 countries. He originally isolated four dimensions of what he claimed summarized different cultures — power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity (Hill, 2013, p.110). To cover aspects of values not discussed in the original paradigm Hofstede has since added two more dimensions — Confucianism or long-term orientation and indulgence versus self-restraint (Hofstede, n.d.). Because of the way Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are given an index score from 0-100, it is easy for a company to get a general comparison between the cultures they are expanding into and the culture they are already in.

In times of rapid globalisation and economic development growth, the environment of business has become more and more complicated as a huge number of firms want to globally expand their businesses. Subsequently, the managerial implications of cross-cultural management is the challenge of this development. As Abbe (2007) states, cross-cultural leadership has developed as a way to understand leaders who work in the global markets. Culture is the “software of mind” that can influence people’s patterns of thinking and behaving.

Cultural Distance is presumably measured by “the extent to which different cultures are similar or different” (Shenkar, 2001). This construct is now widely used and applied to most business organisation disciplines, such as, management, finance, marketing, and accounting. However, to better explain the impact on global marketing operations, this essay will focus on the marketing segment of the discipline. The study of cultural distance has been used to innovate and transform organisations into foreign expansions and technology transfer (Gomez-Mejia & Palich, 1997). Besides, looking at culture by itself, it is a complicated term to understand. It is seen as a woolly concept , almost impossible to observe and ‘measure’ (Tayeb, 2000c); by then adding the measurement of “distance” between different cultures presents a greater challenge due to the fact that cultural behaviour is not the same across the world. A close attempt at measuring culture would be to break it down to components or dimensions.