Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts

The globalization of the business environment that is being driven by technological and economic factors is resulting in an ever-increasing number of cross-cultural interactions in the workplace. Understanding the influence of culture on interpersonal interactions in organizational settings is now a fundamental requirement of effective international management. This book will be an aid to that understanding.

Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts, Second Edition examines cross-cultural management issues from a predominantly psychological perspective. As opposed to being country specific, this book focuses on the interactions of people from different cultures in organizational settings. That is, the approach used is to understand the effect of culture in a way that can then be applied to a wide variety of cross-cultural interactions in a number of organizational contexts.

This book supersedes the previous volume as it extracts key concepts on management from a cross-cultural perspective and condenses them into an accessible tool for both students and teachers alike.

New to this Second Edition

• Each chapter has been updated to include the most current research available
• Chapter 1 has been refocused to be a synthesis of an introduction to the global business environment the challenge of evaluating international/cross-cultural management research.
• A new Chapter 11 on the Challenge of Managing in the Future
• Expanded coverage of cultural dimensions and negotiation, and of holistic approaches to cross-cultural negotiation in Chapter 6.
• Chapter 7 now contains a section on work motivation across cultures including the material on designing motivating jobs that appeared in Chapter 9 of the previous edition.
• Extended coverage of global virtual teams in Chapter 8.
• Chapter 9 is now refocused to include work on international organization design by Bartlett and Ghoshal.
• Updated coverage of self-initiated overseas assignments, alternatives to expatriation, repatriation, and global careers in Chapter 10.

Intended Audience: Students of organizational behavior, industrial and organizational psychology, and social psychology will find many of the topic areas familiar. However, the focus of this book is on application of these concepts to global management.

David C Thomas (PhD University of South Carolina) is a Professor in the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria and Professor Emeritus of International Management at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the author of a dozen books including (with Kerr Inkson) the bestselling Cultural Intelligence, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. His book Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts (2008, Sage Publications) was the winner of the R. Wayne Pace Human Resource Development book of the year award for 2008. In addition, he has edited (with Peter B. Smith and Mark Peterson) The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management Research from Sage Publications. His research on cross-cultural interactions in organizational settings has appeared in the leading journals in the field. He is currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management.

Dr. Thomas’ academic postings have included positions at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), University of New South Wales, the Pennsylvania State University and The University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he was also Director of the Master of International Business Program. He has held visiting positions at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Hawaii, Massey University, New Zealand, and ESCEM, Tours, France. In addition to teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, Dr Thomas has consulted on cultural diversity issues with numerous organizations. When not teaching or writing he can often be found scraping or varnishing or sometimes sailing his 1984 Hans Christian cutter, “Clovelly.”