Page 361 - Cultures and Organizations

326 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

and Great Britain were strongest on recognizing business’s responsibility
toward society in general.
Around 2000 many people assumed that globalization and the acquisi-
tion of companies across borders would wipe out differences like those in
Table 9.2 and that all business leaders would acquire the American profi le.
The 2008 economic crisis and the fact that national goal profi les refl ect
national cultures with centuries-old roots make that assumption unlikely.

Goal conflicts between leaders from different countries, as well as between
expatriate leaders and their local personnel, are predictable.

The 2008 recession started as a financial crisis in the United States.
Irresponsible practices had put U.S. banks on a disaster track, and the inter-
dependence of the modern global economy spread the damage worldwide.
Our country-by-country comparison from around 1998 had pictured
U.S. business leaders as—even more than their counterparts elsewhere—
fascinated by bigness, greedy, short-term oriented, and out for power. They
were seen as less interested than their foreign colleagues in the longer-
term future, taking less responsibility for their employees, less innovative,
and caring less for the continuity of their businesses.
Aspects of the U.S. national culture described in various chapters of this
book reinforced this pattern—in particular, strong individualism, masculin-
ity, and short-term orientation. Until the 1980s, checks and balances in U.S.
legislation, introduced after the 1929 crisis, had prevented abusive business
practices, but successive presidencies released controls, lowered business
taxes, and opened the gates for a race to get bigger and wealthier in ways

that had been closed before. This process led to giant deficits in the U.S.
national budget and to astronomical self-payments by business leaders, plus
a number of outright scandals, which also spread to other countries.

In hindsight, the 2008 financial crisis could have been predicted from
our 1998 business goals study. Subsequent to the crisis, national govern-

ments stepped in, trying at considerable cost to repair the damage by rebal-
ancing the interests of society, wage earners, and clients with those of
shareholders. In the present fi nancial reshuffling, top leaders from other

parts of the world such as the European Union, China, India, and Brazil
play an increasingly important role. Whoever owns the resources sets the
goals, so global business objectives will very likely shift in the direction of
their values.
This scenario presupposes that economists get rid of the shibboleth of
undisputed economic growth. In the goals attributed to business leaders,