Suchergebnisse

A key approach to understanding cross-national variations in leadership is to examine how leaders handle routine events within their span of control. The sources of guidance employed by samples of middle and senior managers in four Arab nations were surveyed. Saudi managers showed the expected traditional and personalistic pattern of relatively strong reliance on both formal rules and unwritten rules, as well on as co-workers and subordinates. Respondents from Qatar, Oman and Lebanon each differed from this pattern in ways consistent with theories of modernity. Correlations with evaluations of how specific work events had been handled in each nation confirmed the presence of distinctive leader styles. The assumption that there is a relatively uniform style of leadership across Arab nations is thus questioned.

Cross cultural research has made a number of contributions to social thought and has a number of limitations that suggest directions for future work. Understanding the current state and potential future of the field requires understanding how the history of culture analysis has shaped what we as scholars do and what our audience hears. That sort of understanding influences the significance of establishing a Hofstede Chair in Cultural Diversity at Maastricht University as well as influencing the purposes for which the chair should be used.

What do young, business-educated Arab women think about leadership? This study addresses this question by comparing the views of female business students living in four distinct regions: the Arab Levant (Lebanon); the Arabian Gulf (Oman); Northwestern Europe (England) and Southeastern Europe (Romania). Using Weber's ideal types of authority, a comparison of the four groups reveals strong similarities between Omani and Lebanese women's views on leadership, thus supporting the existence of pan-Arab Implicit Leadership Theories (ILT). It is further found that such views on leadership reflect an overlapping of Arab tribal values with the `rational-legal' values associated with mass bureaucratization in the region.

This study addresses cultural issues in business communication across cultures. The concept of 'negotiated' culture is employed, elaborated and applied to empirical data at organizational and individual contextual levels in intercultural encounters. Communication is viewed as a complex, multi-issued, and dynamic process in which global managers exchange meaning. A multi-contextual analysis is used to describe the dynamics and complexity of sense-making processes at the interface of meaning exchange in the collaboration between Danish and Japanese managers. In particular, the concept of 'negotiated' culture is employed to analyse strategic and operational communication between a Danish company and its alliance partner in the Japanese market. A significant amount of research represents a headquarters or western view of communication processes and cultural challenges in strategy implementation. The present study also includes the partner/Japanese view.

This article presents a heuristic attempt at understanding economic action in South Korea. The heuristic is based on the idea of experience-near concepts — as introduced by Clifford Geertz — and constructed by the terms 'affiliation', 'indebtedness' and 'mediation'. In order to enrich the understanding of economic action in Korea I chose the interplay between the functionalist and the interpretivist paradigm. Qualitative interviews with native and foreign executives were conducted on site and interpreted against the background of (Neo-)Confucianism in South Korea. For the purpose of the study I developed 'the (Neo-)Confucian way of life' as an ideal type, following Max Weber's 'ideal typical construction of meaning'.