Multicultural Management

The values structure is represented through the motivational domains. Further, while we anticipate universality in the values structure, i.e. the set of values reflecting a particular motivational domain will remain constant, the relative importance of different domains to specific cultural groups is expected to vary. Cultural variation is reflected through these differences. The central question then concerns the appropriate cultural grouping or layer to reflect these motivational domain differences as they relate to business practices and outcomes. Cultural differences present themselves in the very basics of everyday lives. Cultural opacity takes place when a cultural concept is unique to a culture. This may occur when some culturally defined concepts are transposed from one cultural setting to another. For instance, the American concept of "privacy" sounds more like an alien notion than an individual right to many Chinese, whose culture lacks a similar social norm. And "program," a popular term in the U.S., may not translate into an exact Chinese equivalent because the English word has different meanings in different contexts, some of which do not exist in China. Regarding business management, American culture has nurtured a series of methodologies designated as classical, behavioral, and modelling, while Chinese management, to some extent, absorbs nutrition from ancient Chinese cultural wisdom. Chinese firms have drawn insights from a horse racing legend in which a commoner, whose three horses (the best, the middling, and the slowest) were all a bit slower than the three horses belonging to the king, won two out of the three races because he raced his slowest horse against the king's fastest (resulting in a loss), his middling horse against the king's worst, and his best against the king's middling horse.