Page 371 - Cultures and Organizations

336 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

author wrote, “I think that the career of DPPO is terminated, or rather that
it has never started, and it won’t ever start as long as we in France continue
our tendency to confound ideology and reality.” The journal editor added:
“French blue- and white-collar workers, lower-level and higher-level man-
agers, and patrons all belong to the same cultural system which maintains
dependency relations from level to level. Only the deviants really dislike
this system. The hierarchical structure protects against anxiety; DPO,
however, generates anxiety.” 61

Management Training and
Organization Development

It will be evident from all that has been written in this book and, in partic-
ular, in this chapter that there is no single formula for developing successful
managers that can be used in all cultures. Not only is success differently

defined in different cultures, but systems of initial education in schools and
training on the job are also very different.
Developing managers across cultural barriers could thus be seen as an
impossible task, but fortunately programs should not be judged exclusively
on the basis of their subject matter. They have other important functions
too. They bring people from different cultures and subcultures together
and thereby broaden their outlook. In many organizations international
management development programs have become rites of passage, which
signal to the manager-participant as well as to the person’s environment
that he or she now belongs to the manager caste. They provide a form of

socialization for the managerial subculture, either company- specific or in
general. They also provide a break from the job routine that stimulates
reflection and reorientation.

Management development packages have been developed in the United
States since the middle of the twentieth century. Some approaches have
used intensive discussion of interpersonal processes, such as sensitivity
training and transactional analysis. Culturally, these approaches assumed
low PDI, low UAI, medium to high IDV, and medium to low MAS; the
latter made them somewhat countercultural in the United States.
In cases in which such programs were used with international partici-
pants, dysfunctional behaviors occurred that their trainers rarely under-
stood. With Japanese participants, for example, the giving and receiving of
personal feedback appeared virtually impossible and, when tried, resulted