Page 437 - Cultures and Organizations

402 IMPLICATIONS

Multinational Business Organizations

If intercultural encounters are as old as humanity, multinational business
is as old as organized states. Business professor Karl Moore and historian
David Lewis have described four cases of multinational business in the Med-
iterranean area between 1900 and 100 b.c., run by Assyrians, Phoenicians,
Greeks, and Romans. History does not justify claims that one particular
type of capitalism is inevitably and forever superior to everything else. 19
The functioning of multinational business organizations hinges on inter-
cultural communication and cooperation. Chapters 9 and 10 related shared
values to national cultures and shared practices to organizational (corporate)
cultures. Multinationals abroad meet alien value patterns, but their shared
practices (symbols, heroes, and rituals) keep the organization together.
The basic values of a multinational business organization are deter-
mined by the nationality and personality of its founder(s) and later signifi -
cant leaders. Multinationals with a dominant home culture have a clearer
set of basic values and therefore are easier to run than international orga-
nizations that lack such a common frame of reference. In multinational
business organizations the values and beliefs of the home culture are taken

for granted and serve as a frame of reference at the head office. Persons in
linchpin roles between foreign subsidiaries and the head offi ce need to be
bicultural, because they need a double trust relationship, on the one side
with their home culture superiors and colleagues and on the other side with
their host culture subordinates. Two roles are particularly crucial:

■ The country business unit manager: this person reports to an
international head offi ce.
■ The corporate diplomat: this person is a home country or other
national impregnated with the corporate culture, whose occupational

background may vary but who is experienced in living and function-
ing in various foreign cultures. Corporate diplomats are essential to
make multinational structures work, as liaison persons in interna-
tional, regional, or national head offices or as temporary managers for

new ventures. 20

Other managers and members of foreign national subsidiaries do not
have to be bicultural. Even if the foreign subsidiaries formally adopt home
culture ideas and policies, they will internally function according to the
value systems and beliefs of the host culture.