culture charts
Can a nation’s culture affect its business performance? Yes it can, says Dr Stephen Fox
A nation’s dominant culture can affect how its people communicate and develop their attitudes towards life. This also applies in business.
If that influence is negative it could lead to low productivity, poor quality and serious accidents. Used in the right way though, charting the influence of national culture can help us to tackle the problems that it sometimes causes.
Planes, phones and automobiles
Even though national culture can significantly impact an organization’s performance, its influence is seldom managed. At the beginning of the 1980s, Japanese competition had pushed the Ford Motor Company to the brink of insolvency. Ford’s executives in Detroit recognized that the company would need to reduce the influence of US national culture within the company.
US assertiveness and individualism was controlled and a Japanese-style teamwork approach was introduced. Ford broke up formal and informal barriers between its vertically divided functional units. This became known as ‘chimney breaking’. There were huge quality improvements. Within a year, the number of cars needing repairs fell from ten, down to one per cent.
Downsizing culture
National culture does not always need to be asserted across a whole organization. Its influence can be managed on individual projects within a company. This was true of the development of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The contract for the construction of tower one was awarded to a Japanese company and the contract for tower two to a Korean company.
The Malaysians gave the Japanese team a head start of four weeks. They did this because they knew that the Koreans would work very hard to catch up. This is because rivalry with Japanese industry is a big part of Korean national culture. Record levels of productivity were achieved in the race to complete first. The Koreans finished their work a week before the Japanese did.
These cases show that it is possible to manipulate national cultures or ways of working to competitive advantage.
One system that can be used to do this is culture optimisation methodology (COM). This encompasses the following:
- define enterprise necessities
- find out if the influence of national culture is positive or negative
- find out if the influence of national culture is big or small
- take actions to increase or decrease the influenceof national culture
The first aim of COM is to combine findings from cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, sociology, anthropology and industry-specific investigations into a format which practitioners can understand. COM is not a theory of what national culture is or how it influences organizations and industries.
Next apply findings about national culture to the most significant challenges facing businesses and institutions. Findings must be collected, and the patterns within them identified.
Define enterprise imperatives
Enterprises have to fulfil a variety of imperatives, some of which may be in conflict. For example, teamwork may be imperative in a dangerous production process but less important, or even counterproductive, among a disparate network of sales people.
Determine the type of influence
To decide if national culture has a positive or negative influence on the chosen necessity (eg teamwork), five pieces of information about national culture need to be considered:
- values
- views
- lores
- links
- carriers
In this context, ‘values’ indicates the preference of certain behaviours over others.
Together, 'values' and 'views' generate the context for actions. They determine what can be regarded as ‘normal’ behaviour.
‘Lores’ refers to implicit theories within a nation’s population. In Britain, the so-called class system is a powerful implicit theory which can impact negatively on teamwork between organizations.
‘Links’ refers to people’s most deeply-rooted cultural
associations.
Together, ‘lores’ and ‘links’ can have a determining influence on peoples’ choice of action.
The final input is ‘carriers’. In a lot of cases national
culture is carried from generation to generation.
Determine the amount of influence
There are factors which reduce the influence of national culture. When these are present, the influence of national culture may be minimal. These factors are:
- global competition
- dissimilar industry culture, which is an industry culture which is dissimilar to the national culture
- dissimilar culture. Companies that are consistently successful tend to have their own very powerful culture which overrides the influence of national culture
- no primers. These are images, events etc that remind people about their national culture and trigger responses based on people’s cultural learning
- low visibility. Research shows that the influence of national culture is reduced when people do not have to explain to a potentially critical audience why they have made a decision
When all five factors are present in an enterprise, national culture may have only a very small influence. This is because together these factors reduce the effect of cultural messages.
Increase cultural effect
There are also factors which can amplify the influence of national culture:
- cultural representation. When enterprises involve people from only a few sections of society, there is unlikely to be full representation of a national culture
- similar industry culture. When individualism is a dominant value in national and industry culture, teamwork, for example, can be exceptionally difficult
- similar culture. A dominant value such as individualism can become exaggerated when national culture, industry culture and organizational culture are similar
- human overload. This occurs when people have too much to do in too little time
- environmental uncertainty. When people have to make decisions based on ambiguous information, they will often refer to their cultural learning
Take action
The COM influence analysis data is used to generate culture charts. Figure 1 shows the culture chart for teamwork on a large one-off construction project in the UK. The chart shows the dominant negative influence of British national culture. This is because all of the positive factors, and none of the negative factors, are present.
Figure 1
Culture chart
(UK teamwork/one-off construction project in UK)
Figure 2 shows the cultural chart for teamwork within a Japanese car factory in Britain. This culture chart indicates that the negative influence of British national culture is negligible.
Figure 2
Culture chart
(UK teamwork/Japanese car factory in UK)
Generating culture charts is not an end in itself. Like control charts, culture charts are tools which help to understand and manage the complex relationships that affect performance.
First, culture charts clarify what type of influence, as well as how much influence, national culture is likely to have. This involves generating culture charts for all of an enterprise’s imperatives.
Culture charts can be used to plan how the influence of national culture will be optimised. There is a wide range of actions which can be taken to achieve this. Culture charts can help to monitor and communicate progress.
Why you need COM, now…
With increasing globalisation and the breakdown of vertically integrated supply chains, enterprises are becoming more complex. In particular, emerging organizational forms such as value networks and virtual enterprises are characterised by environmental uncertainty. This factor alone can increase the influence of national culture.
In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult for one single powerful organizational culture to dominate an enterprise. Consider, for example, the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Sixty years ago, it was possible for one culture to dominate the NHS.
In the UK today, the provision of healthcare involves a huge number of diverse organizations with very different cultures. The common cultural denominator among all of these is national culture. COM offers simple procedures to
help understand and manage that influence.
About the author
Dr Stephen Fox has over twenty-five years experience in industry.
While working full-time, he has obtained an MSc and PhD as well as
vocational and professional qualifications. He is currently working
on a number of projects at VTT, the technical research centre of Finland.
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