Page 272 - Cultures and Organizations

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quick abandonment of novel ideas” is evident; managers are rewarded or
victimized by today’s bottom line even where that is clearly the outcome
of decisions made by their predecessors or pre-predecessors years ago, yet
the force of a cultural belief system perpetuates the system.
Supported by a network of associates, Geert studied the goals that
part-time M.B.A. students in seventeen countries ascribed to the country’s

business leaders. The combination of the importance of “profits 10 years

from now” and the unimportance of “this year’s profits” was signifi cantly
correlated with LTO. 20
East Asian entrepreneurship is not based only on the values of the
entrepreneurs. Both the story at the beginning of this section and the way
the CVS scores were found (by surveying student samples) suggest that the
decisive values are held broadly within entire societies, among entrepre-
neurs and future entrepreneurs, among their employees and their families,
and among other members of the society.
Gordon Redding, in a book based on interviews with overseas Chinese

businessmen, divided the reasons for respondents’ efficiency and failure
into four parts: vertical cooperation, horizontal cooperation, control, and
adaptiveness. About vertical cooperation he wrote:

The atmosphere is not . . . one in which workers and owner/managers natu-
rally divide into two camps psychologically. They tend to be similar socially,
in terms of their values, their behavior, their needs, and their aspirations. . . .
One of the outcomes of this vertical cooperativeness is willing compliance.
This tendency is also reinforced by early conditioning of people during child-

hood and education, and the respect for authority figures, deeply ingrained
in the Confucian tradition, tends to be maintained throughout life. . . . An
extension of this willingness to comply is willingness to engage diligently in

routine and possibly dull tasks, something one might term perseverance. This
nebulous but nonetheless important component of Overseas Chinese work
behavior, a kind of micro form of the work ethic, pervades their factories and
offices. . . . The huge diligence required to master the Chinese language has

played a part here, as has also the strict order of a Confucian household. 21

We recognize the LTO components of ordering relationships by status and
maintaining this order and of perseverance; the latter functions not only in
the sustained efforts of the entrepreneur in building a business but also in
those of his or her workers in carrying out their daily tasks.