Building Cross-Culture Competence

Based on fourteen years of research involving nearly 50,000 managerial respondents and on the authors' extensive experience in international business, the book compares American cultural values to those of more than forty other nations. It explores six culture-defining dimensions and their reverse images (universalism-particularism, individualism-communitarianism, specificity-diffusion, achieved status-ascribed status, inner direction-outer direction, and sequential time-synchronous time) and discusses them as alternative ways of coping with life's - and business's - exigencies. With humor, cartoons, and an array of business examples, the authors demonstrate how the reconciliation of cultural differences can cause whole organizations to grow healthier, wealthier, and wiser.