Will the 5 dimensions solve the problem?

Ever heard of the 5 cultural dimensions?
These dimensions, developed by Hofstede, focus on national culture. As the internationalization is increasing, more and more managers need to work together with people from different cultures. It's quite possible that those culture differences give rise to misunderstandings.
So after comparing the pros and cons, the international business people have intensively accepted this theory to avoid these misunderstandings. These 5 dimensions show what all cultures have in common, especially in the business sector.

However, do these dimensions solve the problem? Can they relate the cultural differences to different ethical attitudes? To find out you need to click on "read the paper". The result, after intensive reading, will definitely surprise you!

Febe De Lille

read the paper

Whoops!

I used to think that an enterprise as big as Honda would take the time to do some though going research on cross cultural marketing. But too bad, when Honda launched the new Honda Fitta, they had forgotten to check what Fitta means. So after a while they discovered Fitta was an old Finish word for female genital, this horrible mistake meant to Honda that they had to rename the car and restart the whole marketing campaign. I have no idea who paid this, but this example might be one of the best proofs why enterprises have to bear cross cultural differences in mind.

Géraldine

Read some other stupid mistakes.

Cross-cultural differences in ethical attitudes: Reality or theory?

There may be a theory about cross-cultural differences in ethical attitudes, but are there really differences throughout the world? In this research, researchers tried to identify significant differences in business ethics between students from China and the USA. The students were asked to agree/disagree with eight statements concerning business ethics. Seven statements showed significant differences between the Chinese and American students. As this research shows, we can conclude that there may be indeed differences in business ethics throughout the world. Nevertheless, we must be careful with this conclusion as we can't generalise this comparison.

For the details and numbers of the research, consult the research paper


Peter Depypere

What do cross-cultural differences mean?

When you hear ‘cross-cultural differences’, you kind of know what they're talking about. But do you really?
To solve the issue of cultural differences we need to go back to the original definition.
Culture is defined as a pattern of thinking and potential acting. Learning how to think and act is thought by the people around you, and personal life experiences. Your culture makes you who you are and how you think. People of the same country even have cultural differences.
We know that cross-cultural differences play a significant role in business relations where it is all about reading the other person.
But it is not only in business relations that people bump into these problems. The Australian Flexible Learning Frameworks shows that cultural differences also influence the effectiveness of learning. When teachers look over cultural differences in front of students with different cultures, then these might question the teachers knowledge or feel left out.
To prevent this, they have written an article to tell more about the different aspects, consequences and preventions, get the reader motivated and interested to reduce the secrets of cultural differences. By reading this article, you can prevent quite some misunderstandings! Do you want to contribute? Read the article, just by clicking on the following link.


Febe De Lille

Read the article here

Cross-Cultural training

Cross-Cultural training, a new popular term. Research on Google after those 3 words gives us 4.450.000 hits, but what does cross-cultural training means?

After reading some pages on the internet found by Google, teamwork between people with a different culture doesn’t seem that easy. But no worry, after a training given by for example, Kwintessential, the strange Chinese can become your soul mate. Of course leaders of the firm don’t have to feel jealous because they can come along with their employees and in the mean time also get coached.

On the whole I start to think that this kind of training is more profitable for Kwintessential than for the firm who is asking for it.

Géraldine