Cross cultural studies has great impact especially to business managers. National culture or core culture that developed the individual before it is influenced by other factors in the environment and society is subject to change depending on how strong the influences would be. However for the individual to fit in, they have to embrace the new found culture or a new culture might have evolved combining the core values and the current society’s value.
Literature ReviewIn Kelley, MacNab and Worthle (2006) paper, they have studied that when two or more diverse cultures are combined together, depending on how strong the county’s core national culture, three things may occur – culture convergence, divergence or crossvergence. Their study of US, Hongkong and Taiwan for years had gave them results on how culture can change. Like for example is in terms of uncertainty avoidance and power distance between Hongkong and Taiwan. It was found that Hongkong increases its uncertainty avoidance than Taiwan and the reason for this could be because Hongkong was turn over from UK to China.
US known to be the first individualist country from previous studies appears to becoming collectivist and the power distance increases from their study of US banking industry. This one has been attributed to the layoffs happened in banking industry when the study was conducted. The authors remarked that Culture can change due to influences like globalization, economic and technological change brought by outside forces and interactions. On the other hand, they have argued that there is some cultural aspect that remains static.Values EvolutionRalston (2007) studied the evolution and theories of Values in which he highlighted that the first thing that needs to be identified are the factors or influences of values. The traditional perspective of values composed of sociocultural influences, economic influences, technological influences and political influences but with the involvement of time, the economic, political and technological influences are merged into one as business ideology influence and the second one remains the sociocultural influence.
With the influences being set, he looked into the three ways on how values evolve.First one is the Convergence. Convergence theory is said to develop in relation to technology without taking consideration the sociocultural influences. This means that the new value will be created from the core value blended with the value that corresponds to the current technology. In the area of project management for example, due to companies going for internalization, the some traditional way of handling and implementing project may no longer be applicable. If communication was done through telephone before, most of the companies are now using webinars, online gotomeeting or the less expensive and most prefer method in the case of our company and client – through Skype.
Our head office has actually started installing Skype to all our meeting rooms to meet international client’s preference.Divergence theory is the exact opposite of the Convergence where the sociocultural influence becomes static regardless of changes technology, economy and politics. Japan for example is considered a homogeneous culture and popularly stereotypes as high collectivist culture. This can be attributed to the Japanese history.The most recent developed values theory is the Crossvergence where both sociocultural influences and business ideology influences (technology, economy, politics) are the factors that create new individual values (Ralston, 2007). Crossvergence was further classified as conforming (individual level differences across groups decreases over time), static (values across group change over time but values differences will be constant) and deviating (values differences increases over time across groups).
The question as why the crossvergence is produced instead of convergence was answered by North (1990, 2005 cited in Witt 2007) that it could be the path dependence or choice of the most appropriate action.ConclusionThe cross cultural management study about convergence and the most recent theory about crossvergence have been one of the important management argument. This has been a great impact to the businesses as they compete with the highly competitive global environment in supporting culture diversity to all stakeholders. As much as possible, company wanted to established a set of common values for the organization but this is difficult to achieve thus the next important action to take is to understand how these multiple values evolve, understand its commonality and the best way to manage it. According to Myloni (2004, cited in Dunn and Shome, 2009, p.
527), managers regardless of their cultural background should know how to adapt similar-looking value to meet business challenges.
