Global Collaboration: Intercultural Experiences and Learning

The West has dominated the world for half a millennium, but at present there are signs that this is about to change and that Asia, in particular China and India, will come to occupy that position in the socio-economic global framework. These two populous countries have sustained high growth rates for several decades, far surpassing those in the West. In 2010, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 9.7 per cent, and that of China by 10.3 per cent. The corresponding figure for the United States is 2.8 per cent, while that of the Euro Area is 1.8 per cent (International Monetary Fund, 2011) and that of Denmark is 2.1 per cent (Danmarks Statistik, 2011). Although growth rates in Asia may slow down in the coming years, they are still expected to be higher than in the West. Young Asians’ growing confidence in Asia’s future is documented by a recent survey of foreign students in the United States. The results show that only 6 per cent of Indian students and 10 per cent of Chinese students would like to stay on in the United States on a permanent basis. This is a significant change compared with surveys made only five to ten years earlier, which showed that more than 80 per cent of these students wished to stay in the United States if possible (Wadhwa et al., 2009).

Today’s global business environment requires that organizations increasingly consider the context in which management must function. While economics, politics and technology may define the playing field of international management, it is a game of cross-cultural interactions that is being played (Thomas, 2008). Cross-cultural management research involves both international comparative research and intercultural research in the context of multinational organizations. In this introductory chapter, I divide the overall discussion of cross-cultural management into three domains. First, I discuss the current theory and methods issues confronting cross-cultural management research. Second, I turn attention to the links between culturally different individuals and their organizations. Finally, I present cross-cultural aspects of multinational organization processes and structures.

Denmark has a long history as a sovereign state, normally assumed to date back to the tenth century AD . Since the seventeenth century, however, the country has continuously lost power, influence and territory to its neighbours, first to an emerging Sweden, and then in the nineteenth century to the united Germany led by Prussia. Yet, although Danes share many cultural traits with Sweden and northern Germany they have spent much energy on distancing themselves from these two neighbours. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Denmark and the Danes have oriented themselves towards the English-speaking countries, first the United Kingdom and, since World War II, the United States. The peculiar combination of a long, uninterrupted existence as a sovereign state and the many military defeats has resulted in a national culture and identity that combines self-confidence with apparent humility. These same traditions have had a strong influence on behaviour in the workplace and Danish management traditions, at home and abroad. Behind this apparent humility, however, lurks a feeling of superiority on behalf of the small nation and its own, ‘Danish’, culture, only thinly disguised as an inferiority complex. This combination often manifests itself in ironic forms of discourse and a relaxed informality which, if challenged, may suddenly change into aggressive self-assertion and almost authoritarian attitudes.

Global collaboration, the focus of this volume, is a crucial success factor in international business (for a summary see also Ng, Van Dyne & Ang, 2009b). Global interactions occur in many day-to-day business operations and especially when managers are assigned to foreign locations for business travel or longer periods of time (see, for example, Earley & Mosakowski, 2004; Littrell et al ., 2006). Successful collaboration in these interactions is a complex and demanding task, requiring mutual and profound intercultural understanding by the parties involved. This understanding is the result of intense cultural learning processes (Waxin & Panaccio, 2005).

Jimmy is older, he is more senior and he is my boss. And this means that even when we have an argument, we observe the proprieties. […] I speak with him in a polite manner, and I make sure to express myself so that he has a ‘back door’ – if in the end it turns out that what I said was right, I can say: ‘Well, that really was what you meant from the beginning, wasn’t it?’ […] Some of the biggest cultural mistakes I’ve made in China concern situations in which I was right and the solutions I suggested were eventually used, and it was witnessed by others. […] Once I sent out a mail that made it clear that I recommended solution A, and people knew that Jimmy had recommended B. Jimmy called me, very upset: ‘Listen, either I have to cut you down to size or take a major face loss myself – what on earth were you thinking? […] Why did you send a copy of that mail to everyone in the office?’ […] This situation was one of my first eye-openers.

The quote above is from an interview with a Chinese inpatriate posted at the Danish headquarters of the multinational company (MNC) Techbi.¹ In spite of the fact that the company’s top management has identified China as a crucial growth region, his words illustrate that in his experience, his particular knowledge and perspective are not exploited fully. By drawing more on the backgrounds and qualifications of inpatriates, the MNC may find it easier to exchange knowledge and strike the right balance between global integration and local adaptation, not least at the cultural level (see Gertsen & Søderberg, 2012).

Multinational companies (MNCs) face an increasing need for leaders with international job experience, openness towards people with other cultural backgrounds and receptiveness to other ways of doing business within the organization. Traditionally, such cross-cultural skills and abilities are acquired during long-term expatriation and nurtured through training and mentoring. However, long-term assignments are expensive for companies (Stahl & Björkman, 2006, pp. 167–168) and strenuous for many employees. The HR manager’s remarks above raise a relevant question as to whether cultural sensitivity can be nurtured through a number of shorter stays in several regions, in particular because many international assignees have had internships abroad or studied at foreign universities and thus are expected to have quite a different take on working in multicultural business contexts than their parents’ generation.

Conveying corporate values from headquarters to foreign subsidiaries across the world poses a problem for multinational companies. Some research claims that cultural differences make such transference difficult, especially if there are major cultural disparities between the country of origin and the country in which the subsidiary is located (Kostova & Roth, 2002). However, some empirical research shows that cultural differences are not necessarily a major obstacle (Brannen, 2004; d’Iribarne, 2012 ; Gertsen & Zølner, Chapter 9 in this volume). Some researchers claim that reinterpreting the values of a parent company in a different cultural context is possible (Brannen, 2004). However, the modalities of reinterpretation raise some questions. To what extent is this reinterpretation possible? How does it work when current practices in a country are contrary to the values of the parent company? In that case, should corporate culture prevail over the national culture in a subsidiary?

There is widespread belief that a globally shared set of corporate values is a viable managerial tool and a unifying force in a multinational company (MNC) (Welch & Welch, 2006). Therefore, many MNCs consider the transfer of such values to be crucially important when they buy or establish subsidiaries outside their country of origin. For the tool to be efficient, however, the corporate values must not only be transferred to the subsidiary, but also be well received and internalized by local managers and employees. This is a complex process, and literature is inconclusive as to how to ascertain whether values that have proved successful in one context will thrive in another. Some researchers suggest that previous international experience makes the transfer of immaterial assets (values, thought patterns and practices) easier for the company (e.g., Delios & Beamish, 2001), and that ‘cultural proximity’ increases the chances of success (e.g., Kostova, 1999; Kostova & Roth, 2002). However, Brannen (2004) uses the example of the Walt Disney Company’s success in Japan and initial failure in France to illustrate that neither cultural proximity nor international experience guarantee a smooth transfer of immaterial assets. Therefore, although there is some research on attempts by MNCs to transfer immaterial assets such as corporate values to different host-country environments, we do not yet have a full understanding of the process.

This chapter investigates how the Carlsberg Group,¹ following a series of international mergers and acquisitions in 2008, launched a strategic concept labelled Winning Behaviours in all markets in which the multinational company operates. From a company perspective, the strategy aims to guide how business is done in order to achieve better global alignment, whilst at the same time allowing local brands and initiatives to flourish. We describe how the corporate communications and human resource departments at headquarters facilitate this strategic process, and also look at how these Winning Behaviours have been recontextualized and given sense by local and expatriate managers in selected subsidiaries in Asia. In Carlsberg Malaysia, for example, the Winning Behaviours are a very visible part of the company’s visual identity. The photograph above shows vignettes posted in the subsidiary to illustrate the five behaviours.

[All of our local team leaders] can recite, without hesitating, what our company expects from a manager […] However, as my culture coach tells me, they don’t have our values under the skin. They are ambivalent when it comes to managing their own people.

When Anna, a customer account manager at a global consumer products company, was promoted to run the global key account team for Carrefour, a French-based global retailer, she knew she was in for a challenge. Her team consisted of 12 regional account managers, each located in a different part of the world, with up to ten country account managers reporting to each of them. The previous key account manager had rarely brought the team together physically or virtually, insisting that the task really was a regional one and as long as each region did well the customer was happy. Anna was watching the competition, though, and thought there were opportunities to get more business for Carrefour by providing services that integrated more tightly with Carrefour’s global initiatives. How to manage this global team? She turned to Google to start finding resources.

The quotations above, from two Born Global small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are active in Asia, indicate a sincere willingness to learn from intercultural collaboration and a global orientation. This is not surprising, as the Born Global concept of refers to a company that attempts to gain significant advantages through the use of resources from or the sale of outputs to multiple countries from the time of its founding. These companies do not launch their activities in their home market and expand geographically in a gradual manner. Rather, they view the world as their marketplace and have an international or even a global perspective on their business from the outset (Madsen & Servais, 1997). With very few exceptions, Born Globals start out as SMEs.

As indicated in the quotations above, this chapter discusses what has so far been a success story. We explore a case of geographically dispersed teams with a view to furthering our understanding of the factors that have enabled a successful start. While extant literature tends to focus on cultural differences as obstacles to be overcome in order to increase performance, practitioners look for means to achieve potential synergies (Stahl et al ., 2010). We look at a case of teams providing financial services to the multinational company (MNC) Techbi¹ (see also Chapter 9) on a global scale. The teams are permanent and consist of local employees at an off-shore centre in India and their managers, some of which work at the headquarters in Denmark and some of which work at the centre in Bangalore. Thus, the teams span across culturally distant countries and the organizational units of headquarters and a subsidiary. According to the traditional view in research literature, such circumstances are likely to lay difficult odds for the teams (e.g., Martins et al., 2003; Watson & Kumar, 1992). But in the present case, the teams in the shared services centre have been considered successful by Techbi during the centre’s five years of operation – to the extent that the MNC plans to expand the centre considerably over the next three years. Moreover, team members at the centre and managers at headquarters provide similar and predominantly positive descriptions of the teams’ functioning, strategies and results.

It is Friday, 3 p.m., in Chennai. Six Indian engineers, one of them the local manager of the research and development team, are sitting in one of the office’s virtual meeting rooms. There are six chairs on one side of the table and three large screens on the other side with room for two people at each. A weekly status meeting is scheduled with two Danish managers from the Technology R&D department at headquarters. With a time difference of only four-and-a-half hours, it is fairly easy to set up real-time meetings. Moreover, the telepresence technology makes the Indian team members feel that the Danish managers on the screen are participating in a face-to-face meeting with them. Without much of an initial greeting and little small talk in between items on the agenda, the Danish managers start going through all joint projects. One after the other the Indian engineers inform briefly about the status of their specific sub-projects and the solutions they propose. Problems they have encountered during the last week are also touched upon. The Indians speak distinctly and at a much slower pace than when they talk with each other. One of the Danish managers asks an Indian engineer very directly: ‘Can we be sure that you will be able to meet the deadline in two weeks?’ Another Indian engineer receives this blunt feedback to his presentation: ‘This solution simply does not fit with the specifications!’ After having observed the hard-working Indian

In this book we have analysed collaboration processes in globalizing companies of Danish origin, with a specific focus on cultural encounters between Western managers and employees and their foreign colleagues at headquarters as well as in Asian subsidiaries. By observing what happens when colleagues with different cultural backgrounds work together, both in person and in the virtual workplace, we have touched upon a number of different issues and approaches to intercultural collaboration.

‘Praxis’ is the dynamic process by which a theory, understanding, or skill is practised, enacted, embodied, and incorporated by individuals at a certain instance in time and space. It has been recurrently put forth as a sine qua non to learning in the field of philosophy through the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, and Arendt in the West, and through the hermeneutics put forth by Lao Tsu, Confucius, Shakyamuni Buddha and many others in the East. Cultural learning for understanding collaboration in the global contexts of today’s multinational organizations should thereby be predicated on no different process. In juxtaposing theory with experiential, empirically grounded, cross-cultural field studies, this volume does exactly this and as such goes far in demonstrating how a praxis approach can advance the field of cross-cultural management beyond its current limitations to provide thoughtful, nuanced guidance around understanding the challenges of global collaboration.