Page 339 - Cultures and Organizations

304 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

similar to the one presented at the beginning of this chapter. This case,

too, dealt with a conflict between two department heads within a company.
Among the INSEAD M.B.A. (master of business administration) students
taking the exam, the three largest national contingents were the French,

the Germans, and the British. In Figure 9.1 we find their countries in the
lower right, lower left, and upper left quadrants, respectively.
Stevens had noticed earlier that the students’ nationality seemed to
affect their way of handling this case. He had kept a file of the examination

work of about two hundred students, in which, with regard to the case
in question, the students had written down, individually, (1) their diag-
nosis of the problem and (2) their suggested solution. Stevens had sorted
these exams by the nationality of the author, and he separately reviewed all
French, all German, and all British answers.
The results were striking. The majority of the French students diag-
nosed the case as negligence by the general manager to whom the two
department heads reported. The solution preferred by the French was for

the opponents to take the conflict to their common boss, who would issue
orders for settling such dilemmas in the future. Stevens interpreted the
implicit organization model of the French as a “pyramid of people”: the
general manager at the top of the pyramid and each successive level at its
proper place below.
The majority of the Germans diagnosed the case as a lack of structure.

The scope of responsibility of the two conflicting department heads had
never been clearly laid down. The solution preferred by the Germans was
the establishment of procedures. Possible ways to develop these procedures
included calling in a consultant, nominating a task force, and asking the
common boss. The Germans, Stevens felt, saw an organization ideally as
a “well-oiled machine” in which management intervention is limited to
exceptional cases because the rules should settle all daily problems.

The majority of the British diagnosed the case as a human relations
problem. The two department heads were poor negotiators, and their skills
in this respect should be developed by sending them to a management
course, preferably together. The implicit model of an organization in the
minds of the British, Stevens thought, was a “village market” in which nei-
ther hierarchy nor rules but rather the demands of the situation determine
what will happen.
Stevens’s experience happened to coincide with the discovery, in the
context of the IBM research project, of power distance and uncertainty