Figure 4.7
Summary of the British Cultural Metaphor (The traditional British House), Access Leverage
Points (ALP’s), and Interventions Strategies.
Step 1
The Sub-Metaphorical
Constructs
Step 2
The Access
Leverage Points
Step 3
The Intervention
Strategies
Historical Foundations of
Great Britain
Acceptance of Tradition
Subtlety of Language
Identify relevant traditions.
Demonstrate how the change
builds upon the traditions.
Involve people in the change
to embrace ownership.
Discount overt stimuli.
Pay strict attention to subtle
clues.
Engage in diplomatic behavior.
Socialization in
Great Britain
Probity of position
Use of Ceremony
Ensure contact at appropriate
level.
Demonstrate top management
commitment.
Involve key stakeholders.
Involve top management in
ceremonies.
Use ceremonies to mark the
beginning of change.
Disposition Towards Rules
Specify rules as guidelines.
Awareness of Traditions as a
Way of Life in Great Britain
Build upon existing rules.
Source: Pearce and Osmond (1996)
47
EXERCISE 4.6: STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL METAPHORS
The goal of this exercise is to show how a stereotype differs from a cultural metaphor.
Using think-pair-share, the instructor should ask the students to answer the following questions:
* What is a stereotype?
*Is a stereotype necessarily bad?
• John is an X,
• Thus John is stupid.
Are stereotypes necessarily bad? According to Adler (1991), not if they are:
• A first best guess
• Based on data and observation
not include every individual or even sub-group. However, stereotypes and cultural metaphors do
overlap. See Gannon and Associates (2001), Chapter 1, for further discussion.
EXERCISE 4.7: THE CULTURAL INTERVIEW
Each member of the class should select one chapter from Gannon and Associates (2001),
e.g., the Chinese Family Altar. He or she should develop a series of interview items based on the
EXERCISE 4.8: DEBATING THE MERITS OF CULTURAL METAPHORS
Students or trainees should be assigned to small groups. One set of groups should
describe the strengths and weaknesses of cultural metaphors. A second set of groups should
describe the strengths and weaknesses of cross-cultural dimensions, particularly Hofstede’s well–
known five dimensions (see Figure 3.1). Each small group should prepare an overhead. Finally,
Figure 4.8
Summary of Class Debate
METAPHORS
General Strengths:
Affords a rich, detailed, in-depth of understanding of a culture.
May include elements not captured in dimensional approach.
Affords a dynamic view of culture, which includes actual
experience, and vivid images which capture many of the senses.
Can help see how people participate in culture.
Provides an integrated view of culture which captures the
interrelationships among dimensions, and how they relate to
understanding, for both theory and method).
General weaknesses:
Doesn t easily allow for comparisons.
Is not empirically verified (as of yet).
and may stick .
Some metaphorical mappings may be a stretch .
Have mainly been discussed at the culture level.
Needs the dimensional approach.
DIMENSIONS
General Strengths:
Allows for a common metric to compare cultures, and a
structure to understand an immense amount of detail.
Quantifiable. Can derive specific dimensions, and measures,
and can be used to predict psychological phenomenon.
Verifiable. Procedures are available to validate whether ranking
of cultures supports theory.
Amenable to large scale, multi-country studies, where cultures
less negative reactions.
Has been researched at the individual and culture level.
General weaknesses:
It is hard to keep a 5-D of culture in mind!
Research in cross-cultural psychology tends to examine one
dimension (I/C).
Are extremely broad, and miss important elements.
Can obfuscate within-culture diversity and dynamics of culture.
Needs the metaphor approach.
49
EXERCISE 4.9: CREATING ADVERTISING SLOGANS
Figure 4.9 summarizes the cultural metaphors and their specific dimensions for five
nations. The instructor may also want to use Figure 3.3, which delineates specific types of
individualism and collectivism. In this exercise the instructor points out that more than 10% of
Students should work in their groups for about 20-30 minutes. Each group prepares one
or two overheads for class presentation.
It is important to stress that the students should incorporate the cultural knowledge they
have been studying, and that they should avoid broad-gauged stereotypes. See Figure 4.11.
51
Figure 4.9: Characteristics of the Metaphors
SWEDISH STUGA
* love of untrammeled nature
* individualism through self-development
* equality
* huddling — people from different backgrounds and abilities come together
periodically to solve short-term problems. Football is the only game in the world having a
huddle after every play. Teamwork + competitive specialization.
* ceremonial celebration of perfection.
GERMAN SYMPHONY
* pageantry and spectacle
* voice or lyrical quality. More vowels than consonants. Talking = singing.
* exteriority. The belief that the individual cannot keep thoughts and emotions to
himself/herself. Thoughts and emotions must be expressed, first in the family and then in the
piazza. Equivalent to the crowd scenes in opera.
* well-integrated social unit uniting generations, including the dead who are still
considered to be present
Figure 4.10: Instructions for the Advertising Slogan Exercise
• Your team has been hired by the largest U.S. travel agency to attract people from other
nations to the U.S.
53
Indian ceremonies should most probably be stressed more for the Italians than for the Swedes
because of the subcategories of pageantry and spectacle, voice, and exteriority.
Marketing and Advertising are particularly appropriate for cross-cultural exercises, as the
teacher can go over well-known fiascos such as trying to sell the Nova automobile in Spain
its two Boards and compare it to the single Board of Directors in the U.S. Using think-pair-
share, the instructor should ask the students to examine these organizational arrangements in
terms of these cultural metaphors. The instructor can also refer to Hofstede’s rankings of the
U.S. and Germany on five cross-cultural dimensions (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 4.11: Instructions for Creating a Complete Advertisement
• Your team has been hired by the largest U.S. travel agency to attract people from other
nations to the U.S.
• You need to develop an advertisement to motivate people from your assigned nation to
travel to the U.S. Assume you will be presenting your advertisement to the top management
• Remember, your advertisement should overlay the cultural metaphors of the U.S. and
your selected nation, but not totally. People must feel comfortable (overlap), but the
advertisement should include activities not available at home.
• Avoid broad-gauged stereotypes.
The instructor should point out that Germany emphasizes Social Democracy or a system
labor union representatives. These two boards must work together on goals and company
objectives. Also, a company must have a separate workers’ council (Betriebsrat), which has the
right to monitor all corporate plans and actions.
For example, a downsizing plan must be agreed upon by members of the Vorstand, then
approved by the Aufsichtsrat, and finally presented to the Betriebsrat before the powerful
out three major reasons why such activities continue:
* Companies possess non-overlapping core competencies that theoretically strengthen
the new organizational arrangement. A core competence is an internal strength and/or resource
that is difficult to imitate, valuable, rare, and nonsubstitutable, e.g., Walmart’s logistic system.
* The early mover advantage, especially in the international area.
55
The instructor can divide the class into small groups. Each group should be assigned one
of the mergers below. The group should reseach this merger and apply cultural knowledge to it,
focusing specifically on the cross-cultural issues. These German-American mergers are:
* DaimerChrysler
* Deutsche Bank and Bankers Trust
They read about a particular international alliance such as DaimlerChrysler and create an
interview which incorporates economic-focused questions and culturally-focused questions
derived from the cultural metaphors. Each student or group then writes a paper summarizing the
interview data. Class presentations can also be scheduled.
EXERCISE 4.14: SELLING FURNITURE
• Spanish
• German
• Italian
• Swedish
• Indian
one cultural metaphor (see, for example, Figure 4.9). The group should then describe how the
following case about office assignments would be generally solved in each nation. The case is
taken from Gannon, 1988.
“Office assignments are very important in an organization. When desirable offices
become available, individuals frequently struggle to obtain them. But large-scale reassignments
56
a new building. Thus it was not possible for every faculty member to move into a more desirable
office, but certainly some of them would be able to do so. Immediately, however, problems
emerged. Some faculty members with many years of service felt that they deserved priority in
office assignments, especially if they were full professors (the three tenure-track ranks in this
university were Professor, tenured Associate Professors, and untenured Assistant Professor).
journals emphasing statistical testing of hypotheses, more popular but widely-distributed
publication such as Business Week and The Harvard Business Review, or university,
professional and community service?
The Executive Committee of the College was responsible for making this decision on
reallocation of offices. It consisted of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the six
* To be eligible for a new office, a faculty member had to give up the right to his current
office.
* A pool of offices was then created consisting of the new offices and the offices put into
the pool by faculty members.
* The Executive Committee used the method of paired comparison to rank order the 25
Exercises 4.9 and 4.10 emphasized creating advertisements using cultural metaphors.
This exercise asks that the students or trainees examine the following two ads, one of which was
created for the Hispanic-American culture and the other for the White Anglo Saxon culture. The
instructor should ask: What is the major difference between these two ads?
Research has suggested that the Spanish culture is more responsive to emotional appeals
EXERCISE 4.17: MILITARY AND BUSINESS STRATEGY
A well known exercise in business strategy is comparing the French and German strategy
Figure 4.12
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59
EXERCISE 4.18: INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIES
Using the Harvard Business School’s website or another source, select an international
strategy case that is country specific. Then have small groups apply the cultural metaphor of that
nation to the analysis of the case. In addition to coming up with general business level strategy,
have students also integrate cultural metaphors to support their recommended strategy.
Japanese Work Group,” written by Yoshihisa Kashima and Victor Callan (1994), in Harry
Triandis, Marvin Dunnette, and Leaetta Hough (eds.), Handbook of Industrial and
Organizational Psychology, 2nd ed., Vol. 4. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Gannon and Associates use the Japanese Garden as a cultural metaphor, which is supplemented
by Kashima and Callan’s use of the Japanese IE or Japanese Household.
sense of group solidarity and responsibility.
This exercise involves adopting American management practices in Japan and Japanese
management practices in the United States. The instructor should emphasize that practices taken
from one culture into another culture must be tailored to the culture and not transported
wholesale.
she does not need to assign everyone to a group; other class members can serve as the company’s
Board of Directors to whom the consultants present their analysis.
The Nikkon consultants and Ameritech consultants, who consist of both native-born
Japanese and native-born Americans, are considered to be experts on both Japan and the United
States. The Nikkon consultants should receive the following instructions:
60
preparing individuals for new organizational experiences and changes. In other words, compare
and contrast in your analysis.
*Highlight reasons why it could be productive for Nikkon to make changes in their
system. Note deficiencies of the current system, economic and related changes influencing