I am looking for research that deals with the topic of whether and how different the corporate culture of a business is when it is owned and managed by a foreign company (e.g. the US office of a Japanese company) versus local businesses. Google was non-compliant in my searches. Is anyone aware of any research, or can you think of some better search terms?
I tried “cross border corporate culture”, “foreign owned business corporate culture”, etc. I just got back results on how to make “top down” or “bottom up” corporate cultures in the results…
I just did a search for “Japanese corporate culture” and “German corporate culture” and got bunches of hits, including some with direct comparisons to the U.S. Maybe just try searching by individual countries?
I mean, it’s not really a GQ response but I’ve worked for a couple of Japanese companies in the US, and a few more US companies in the US, and I’m not quite sure what you’re actually looking for. Management style? office/corporate culture? work expectations?
Whether there are any impacts in how people behave in general. Work hours, promotion by contacts / merit / testicles / other, lawfulness, productivity, etc.
While I’m not a search engine, I can speak from experience having worked with multiple companies based around the globe from Australia to France, Serbia to Philippines and UK to US just to name a few.
And in my experience there is most certainly a difference in work ethics between countries, expectations from staff for pay raises, productivity, communication and so forth.
I am proposing that my company has an advantage in terms of promoting on merit and reducing corruption, compared to purely local business. While we are an American company, we have offices in this country that runs all of our business there. In my own experience working abroad, and from things I have read, the parent company can have strong effects on the child company even though it’s not obvious how that would happen, when the child company is completely composed of natives.
I’d like to be able to provide cites to support my statement that our workers do and will maintain general standards of work ethic, promotion by merit, etc. better than local-only businesses. (The specific country is often accused of having projects be delayed or proved impossible due to corruption and incompetence.)
One experience which immediately comes to mind is call centres. In New Zealand the banks, insurance companies, and telecom companies have all tried overseas call centres at some point. Usually based in India and the Philippines. Some still use them despite loud public annoyance.
For well educated Indians and Philippines the NZ accent is a tough ask particularly if the caller gets frustrated. We have local courtesies and colloquialisms which most of the time wouldn’t matter but if we are speaking to a person in another country confusion can arise quickly.
In truth the cultural differences are small but there is a difference. I’d guess that a London call centre would similarly struggle with calls from the north of England and Scotland.
are there general differences when a company is a multinational and when it’s local. Some, but the level of influence can vary in degree from “every year, some aliens in another country review our financial statement” to “everything is managed from abroad and according to the mothership’s rules; all our local managers have been sent from abroad and live in their own enclave, never mixing with us minions”, with a lot of variation in between and therefore with different consequences.
what cultural differences are between corporate culture in the US and in Unnamed Country? This will of course vary depending on which country it happens to be; note that while you’re assuming your culture is better, the people from the other country are likely to disagree. Bunch of resources out there, this one is free and I found it provided interesting information (i.e., for countries where I’ve worked, it seemed close to the mark while sometimes having insights I hadn’t seen; doesn’t mean I agree with everything).
what cultural differences has your specific company have in that other country, due to managing things from the mothership? That’s not something you’ll find in the Web.
I’d be cautious. Just as examples abound of companies that get burnt by assuming that a product which is liked by consumers in the home market should also be liked by consumers in foreign markets, so it may be a mistake to assume that management and employment practices to which American workers respond well will be equally effective, equally motivating, equally rewarding and supportive for workers in other countries. “Promotion by merit” is a good idea, but in one place merit might be equated with output while in another it may be understood in terms of loyalty, investment in relationships, etc, etc. And a communication by a manager which is intended to address a worker’s shortcomings might be experienced as supportive in one culture, but as humiliating in another.
In other words, successful multinationals have to strike the right balance between exporting that which has proved successful in the home market, and adapting to that is is proven to be successful in the host market. Swing too far in either direction, and the result is suboptimal performance. It’s a difficult balance to strike.
No offence, but if you start out with a statement that “that our workers do and will maintain general standards of work ethic, promotion by merit, etc. better than local-only businesses”, and only afterwards cast about for evidence to support it, I think you may be approaching this with an ideologically-driven rather than evidence-based preference for the familiar. That’s probably not the best mindset with which to go about the balancing act just described.
It is based on personal experience, and discussions with others who have worked at foreign owned or local owned businesses in the US and elsewhere, but I do agree that anecdote is not data and you can always find data to support any assumption. I’m not sure, in this case, that there’s any way for me to be confident in the results of a search other than by seeing if there is any inconsistency in the results of the studies. E.g. half say that foreign investment amplifies corruption and half say it reduces it.
I believe I did find “the” term that I was looking for to retrieve useful results from Google Scholar, which was “foreign investment”. I searched for things like “foreign investment corruption” and “foreign investment gender equality”. I didn’t search for “foreign investment reduces corruption”. In theory, this means that I should find papers that are both pro and con, if there is any contention on the subject. As it was, where the discussion was of modernized countries investing in developing countries, they seemed to be consistent in one side of the question.
That said, null results aren’t generally reported, nor results that go against the beliefs of the originator.
In this case, I don’t know what the default belief set would be of researchers. Would a liberal college professor be for or against foreign investment in developing countries? Would they be for it enough to skew the data? I feel like not. I don’t feel like this is a question with a clear political bent. I feel like if the data are all on one side, then that’s because that’s how the data shook out, not because of some quirk of humanity.
Anyways, that is my due diligence. If you have any fault with the logic, let me know. There’s still a few days before I will submit my document for review.
I once worked for a small American company which was bought by a European company. After a period of about ten years they ended up shutting down our entire engineering department and moving it to their headquarters in Amsterdam.