Cultural diffrences as a determinant in international business

When we are talking about a globalized world, where countries and people are connected through many different channels, we must take into account that not everybody thinks or behaves in the same way. The behavior of the individuals depends in many cases on the way they have been raced and what they see around them.The different attitudes, beliefs, preferences or behaviour of people can be grouped under one world: culture. Cultures can change in the same country. As Nick B. Meyer explained in his conference "Dealing with Cultural Differences", National cultures are those present in the same country but different depending of the zone (Ex: Culture in the big cities is different from culture in a small town), there are also subcultures that vary depending on the social groups (Ex: Homosexuals, prison inmates, military). Finally, behavior and culture as a whole, can also change depending on the professions (Ex: nuns, militars).

Studying the differences in the behaviour and culture is important when you are thinking about working in a multinational corporation, taking a company to an other country, or selling a product abroad.

With the purpose of studying the behavior of people from different cultures working and interacting in an organization, culture is divided in several dimensions according to the model of Professor Geert Hoffstede (Ex: Masculinity vs. Femininity, Uncertainty avoidance, Individualism vs. Collectivism, and Confusian Work Dinamism).

In this case I am going to focus on Uncertainty Avoidance and I am going to try to ilustrate it with an example.

Guatemala, Greece, Portugal, Uruguay and Japan are the countries with the lowest tolerance to uncertainy as Singapore, Jamaica, Denmark and Sweden tolerate new ideas easier (Taken from http://internationalbusiness.suite101.com/article.cfm/risk_adverse_trade_cultures).

The Uncertainty Avoidance is a very important aspect to take care of in a big company where people from many countries are working together, and also if you are trying to open a new branch of your company in other place. Depending on this dimension you can anticipate somehow the way somebody reacts towards risk, problems and most important change.

In order to ilustrate the previous, lets imagine that a companie in Sweden wants to open a branch in Greece. First of all, the manager has to take into account that the behavior and culture in this countrie is not the same as the culture in Sweden. The manager reviews the dimensions suggested by Professor Geert Hofstede and when he studies the Uncertainty Avoidance dimension, he finds that in Greece the acceptance of uncertainty is very low. The manager has to create more norms, laws, standarize the processes, make clear goals, objectives and the way to reach them in order to reduce the uncertainty and create a more satisfactory working environment for the people. (http://www.via-web.de/uncertainty-avoidance/)

Every new project has to be analized from the culture of the people involved in the organization and the people out of it. Studiyng culture can be the difference between success or failure.