Page 143 - Cultures and Organizations

122 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Within countries with a dominant individualist middle-class culture,
regional rural subcultures have sometimes retained strongly collectivist
elements. The same applies to the migrant-worker minorities that form
majorities among the workforce in some industries in some individualist

countries. In such cases a culture conflict is likely between managers and
regional or minority workers. This confl ict expresses itself, among other
ways, in the management’s extreme hesitation to use group incentives in
cases in which such incentives would suit the culture of the workforce.
Management techniques and training packages have almost exclu-
sively been developed in individualist countries, and they are based on
cultural assumptions that may not hold in collectivist cultures. A stan-

dard element in the training of first-line managers is how to conduct
appraisal interviews, periodic discussions in which the subordinate’s per-
formance is reviewed. These sessions can form a part of management
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by objectives, but even where MBO does not exist, conducting per-
formance appraisals and ably communicating bad news are considered
key skills for a successful manager. In a collectivist society, discuss ing a
person’s performance openly with him or her is likely to clash head-on
with the society’s harmony norm and may be felt by the subordinate as
an unacceptable loss of face. Such societies have more subtle, indirect
ways of supplying feedback—for example, by the withdrawal of a normal
favor or verbally via an intermediary. We know of a case in which an
older relative of a poorly performing employee, also in the service of the
employer, played this intermediary role. He communicated the bad news
to his nephew, avoiding the loss of face that a formal appraisal interview
would have provoked.
For the same reason, training methods based on honest and direct
sharing of feelings about other people, which have periodically been

fashionable in the United States with labels such as sensitivity training,

encounter groups, or transactional analysis, are unfit for use in collectivist
cultures.
The distinction between in-groups and out-groups that is so essential
in the collectivist culture pattern has far-reaching consequences for busi-
ness relationships, beyond those between employers and employees. It is
the reason behind the cultural embarrassment of Mr. Johannesson and his
Swedish superiors in Saudi Arabia, related at the beginning of this chapter.
In individualist societies, the norm is that one should treat everybody alike.
In sociological jargon this is known as universalism. Preferential treatment
of one customer over others is considered bad business practice and unethi-