Technologies are nowadays connecting people together worldwide, which speed up the international business trading, and thus many multinational companies emerge and grow. The capital and workforce quickly cross-border yet the management is facing the barriers of the cultural difference that lies within the enterprise. The managing style can be poles apart across different cultures, even within the same industry. Steve Jobs, the founder and former executive of U.S. company Apple, describe his business as ‘a so collaborative organisation that has zero committees’ while Akio Morita, the founder and former chairman of Japanese technology giant Sony, define the mission of the company is ‘to create a prosperous company for the employees, and it is the executives’ responsibility to ensure that happens’. Both companies is a great success within the industry yet with different managing ideas. With the fact that more than 90% of the organisational behaviour literature used to be based on US management practice (House 1998), the search for the organisational behaviour and managerial competency among different culture is valuable.
It comes a long way to giving a definition to culture, and anthropologists hardly get into agreement. Spencer-Oatey (2008) define culture as ‘the set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people’, and further ‘influence each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour’. The culture can nurture on a geographical level, national level or organisational level. Within an organisation multiple cultural backgrounds usually, exist and further emerging a new corporate culture. House (2004) observed the influence of organisational culture on managerial practices based on the result of the survey of 17,000 middle managers in banking, food processing and telecommunication industries across 62 societies, under GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness) study, made apparent dimensions of culture and leadership could be distinguished from one country to another. Regarding assessing the competencies of the manager, the cultural differences also impact on the managerial appraisal process as well as organisations select and develop managerial talent (Laurent 1986; Schneider 1988). This paper address how might the differences of the organisational behaviour across different cultures influence the appraisal of the managerial competencies within organisations, using theories and empirical result in the previous studies and real life examples among the various cultures.
Some traditional leadership theories, like trait theories, explained the characteristics of leaders that the follower is highly valued such as the intelligence, dominance and masculinity. In the Western functionalist paradigm, the legitimacy of leadership is largely by the performances (Blunt & Jones 1997), failing to accomplish their role in the organisation will lead to the dethrone of the leadership. Moreover, it may include the failure of build the commitment, morale or involvement of subordinates. On the contrary, in the East Asia, especially Korea and China, based on the neo-Confucianism that believe maintaining harmony with nature, the subordinates rarely question the legitimacy of leadership, and the false act of the leader will not result in any adverse consequences while Virtuocracies, which means the head rule with superior moral worth and keeping concurrence within an organisation, is rooted in the mind of people, shaped by the philosophy of Taoism (Hamilton & Whitley 1994). The process of selecting the leader is primarily intra- or extra-organisational structural arrangement. In India for example, it results in a family-oriented business structure, which accounts for 85% of the business in the whole economy. To be competent in the managerial role in the Western culture is more of motivating followers to maximise their individual talents, while on the other hand in the Eastern culture it is the job of the leaders to adjust the organisational structure and ensure it runs efficiently.
Companies want employees to feel their values to the workplace by giving different kinds of perks. The Swedish giant Ikea introduced ‘Tack!’ programme, which in Swedish is ‘thank you’, provides all co-workers averaging 32 hours or more a week over 52 weeks’ period receive the same amount, regardless of their department, position or salary. On the other hand, Toyota, the biggest automobile company in the world and a family run business, has strictly and detailed job advancement requirements in Japan and motivate their employees by the desire of a higher benefit and status in the more top position. The message sent is clearly opposite between the two companies. The previous message is to show the equality among workers and encourage them to participate, and the leader absorbs all talents to the job, and the following message is to demonstrate a clear idea of a higher position in the hierarchy in the organisation is strict and can only be achieved through dedication and hard work. Therefore, it would be inexplicable and improper if using the same methods under different culture groups. It is also interesting to look at the success story of Toyota as a family run business because it provides a comprehensive idea of Japanese philosophy. Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the founder, Kiichiro Toyoda, is the president and CEO of the Toyota Motor Corporation, breaks into tears when he expresses his appreciation to his employees. The idea behind his grandfather, also the founder of the company, is not to create a company but a family that long lasting and prosperous. He takes his role as a ‘parent’ leader and hold all the responsibilities to every member of ‘family’, and exchange his dedication and accountability to the loyalty of his followers. The cultural difference of the subordinates contributes to the dissimilarity in the leadership. Empirical evidence of the divergence is found by Smith et al. (1989) and categorised as the individuality in the Western cultures (The UK and the USA) are differ from the Asian collectivist cultures such as Japan and Hong Kong.
The traditional theories are yet unable to find the effectiveness of leadership and sometimes the dominant trait can vary due to complicated circumstances. Some more advanced theories like the path-goal theory of leadership (House & Mitcell 1974) operates with the idea that leaders should adapt their leadership styles to their followers based on their expectancy theory. It argues that the leader should tailor their leadership style, including directive, supportive, participative and achievement oriented, along with different employees and circumstances, to clear the obstacles that associated with accomplishing certain goals, so that ensure the employee a clear path to get the desirable rewards. Moreover, hence improve the motivation, job performance and satisfaction of their subordinates. Regardless of cultures, improvements have been made to meet the fierce competition and the changing culture within the nation. With now more than 300,000 workers, although Akio Toyoda still regard himself as the one that should take all the responsibility when there is anything goes wrong with the company, such as in the recall crisis in the United States between 2009 and 2011, he apologised to the American people in the US Congress on behalf of Toyota Motor and all the dealers and suppliers, he explained his ideal leadership style is being invisible when the company doing fine but should be the one to ‘stand out’ when there is a crisis. He adapts his leadership style to different times of the company while stay to be the ‘spiritual’ leader to his subordinates.
Understanding the motivation behind how people behave is crucial to leaders. Content theories of motivation, which provides ways for individual to profile their needs that are assumed to motivate their behaviour (French et al. 2011), hence provides managers information about setting the rewards for their subordinates. Some content theories of Abraham Maslow, David McClelland, Frederick Herzberg, are proved to be popular among managers. Maslow hierarchy of needs theory categorised human needs from lower order needs, including physiological needs, safety needs and social needs, to the higher order needs, such as esteem needs and self-actualization. McClelland’s acquired needs theory contends that people acquired three needs over time: the need for achievement, need for affiliation and need for power, which is the desire to master a skill or complete a task, of keeping a friendly interpersonal relation, and to be influential and important to others. Those needs will help the manager to profile the needs of the individual employee and dealing with their desire accordingly with respective rewards. Herzberg’s motivator-hygiene theory using hygiene factors as the factors that need to be present to ensure a reasonable level of satisfaction, like job security, pay and benefits, and motivational factors that will contribute a great deal to satisfaction in the workplace, such as the advancement and recognition of the job.
An empirical study by Hofstede (1980) tests these three theories in multiple country sources and find the motivator distinguished by cultures. Under the content theories, there is a general pattern based on cultures and varies significantly with each other. Morris et al. (2000) find that unlike US workers, Spanish workers tend to be affiliative orientation, having a high involvement with the relations with co-workers, and while Chinese workers are familial orientation, that ready for sacrifice for the group interest. People in US and European countries has a higher individualism score; hence company management tends to provide the employee with more power and flexible working conditions. Google, with the highest employee ratings in 2016, using gTeam programme that allows workers are working collaboratively at Google. The company regards the value of team dynamics is far more important than the structure or team member, and gTeam is a survey that provided by the corporation to assess teams across the dynamics and provides the team with a report to allow team members to have a data-driven discussion about the team atmosphere. The self-managing teams increase the creativity within the organisation and encouraging workers to make achievement. Most companies in China and East Asia, under the collectivist culture, value the teamwork as well. It is common in the private sectors to see the companies using military training as a method of training employees, allows the subordinates to feel the ‘brotherhood’ or tie between co-workers yet with a strong message of obeying orders at the same time. The respect for the superior leader can transfer into a motivation that the dedication to the job can please the management, and it is naturally rooted in the basis of culture. Requiring working flexibility is regarded as ‘shame’ because it can be understood as abandoning the team and not dedicate enough to the job, and self-sacrifice, such as working overtime, is regarded as a passion to the job and will please the leaders.
After the search for the reason behind the difference in the organisational behaviour, how should
managerial competency be assessed? Moreover, how would the appraisal differ among different cultures? Although the term ‘Competency’ is confusing as various forms of terms were adopted according to Cheng et al. (2003), but it is fair to regard it as the capability of performing the job to the standard expected. To assess the competency, Chong (2008) carried out empirical studies adopting Managerial Assessment of Proficiency (MAP), which published by Parry (1992), due to the wide-ranging of the methods in different cultures and languages while minimising the spurious effect at the same time. The MAP assess the competencies of the manager in four clusters: Administrative cluster, Communication cluster, Supervisory cluster and Cognitive cluster. The study further specified in 12 competencies to gather the data of the managers’ knowledge and recognition of managing practices, which shown in Table 1. With the sample of 1436 managers from four East Asian countries and 3193 managers from the United States, by
Table 1
answering multiple choice questions to video clips of managers’ behaviour, it can be observed in the Euclidean Distance Model in figure 1 that Asian country is dissimilar by nationalities, yet US managers are further away from all the managers in Asian countries. US managers score significantly higher in all the competencies in the people-oriented communication cluster and supervisory cluster. Some other studies are also linking managerial competencies to the cultural dimensions. Hofstede (1984) cultural model that is comparing cultural differences in the four dimensions of power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity vs. femininity. Power dimensions is the tolerance of the unequal distribution of the power within organisation, and can be large or small per the cultural factors; Individualism and collectivism explain the relations to the members of the group, and value on the autonomy and loyalty respectively; Uncertainty avoidance is the flexibility on the guidelines within organisation, and masculinity and femininity are the difference between the basis of hard data or intuition in the decision-making. According to the social stereotypes of the male are more result-focused while the female is intuition centred, the more acceptance of femininity will result in a more female-friendly culture. Boutet et al. (2000) based on the model and align the managerial competency with the Hofstede scale, and further argues the power distance variation in different cultures will affect the leadership and decision-making competencies, while East Asia has a significantly high score of distance; the individualism and collectivism will impact on the competencies such as influencing skills, people development, decision making and leadership, especially on harmony and trust, which Asian countries tend to score towards collectivist; Furthermore flexibility and risk taking decision are affected by uncertainty avoidance, while Southern European, French, Belgium and Japan has a high avoidance compares to other parts of the world; the achievement motivation that affected by the femininity and masculinity is not culturally diverse with a slight skew to the masculine.
Managerial competencies in different cultures differ. With the rising of the Chinese national influence, thousands of Chinese business start to explore the global market. Localisation is not the only problem in products but also the in managing the local employees. Understanding the behaviour across culture provides the manager with a better vision of the appropriate managing style. However, culture as a complex combination of behaviours is very challenging to be measured. It is hard to be quantified and can be problematic and spurious among the variables. Besides, a national culture can be further divided into regional culture, group culture, and family culture, and hence complicated for managers leading a particular group of subordinates.
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