How did you get hooked on the challenges and complexities of intercultural management originally? It was very much different my own experiences, my own culture shock events; and working in a lot in international management, I saw there's a big need. People crossing borders and there's a beginning to understand more about how to manage cross culture situations. What was your first culture shock? Being a German. Having been educated in Germany and in Anglo-Saxon countries, arriving in Italy had been a bit of culture shock in the beginning. So I learned on my own skin what it means to adapt to a different culture. Well, now, it's your professional life. You're teaching here at the university. Yeah. Off campus as well. I think it is particular because we have more and more international students in our university. to whom we see that we have to adopt our teaching, learning, and management style to the diversities we have in class and simple explanations are not enough anymore to respond to the global challenges culture puts on us. I guess here on campus and also with clients I encounter through consulting, the first thing that often they think of and that they are familiar with, the simple answer, if you like, is the Hofstede framework. You have done this for a while, you must have gone over Hofstede a billion times already. Is that something that you use? Yes and no. In the sense that we have to be very thankful to Hofstede because culture and international management has always been a very fuzzy thing. It is thanks to the seminal work of Hofstede that we have today, not a single book or textbook on international management which is does not mention the impact on culture, management, and/or organizational decision making and leadership styles. We have to recognize that we have a lot of knowledge also today on cross culture leadership thanks to Hofstede. Is it because he made it concrete and focused attention on it? Yet, I think the approach has its limitations. Tell me about the limitations you find. We are in Italy, so let us take the Hofstede results on Italy. He is focused on mapping the Italians on his dimension individualism and collectivism as being very individualistic. Everybody can relate to this, Italians are very entrepreneurable, very individualistic. Certainly, this is true, But if you know Italy very well, you will understand that they are also very collectivistic. If we look at the family businesses, the networks that are important, and think about the industrial districts, they are all representations of a very strong collectivism. This is a paradox. With these simple dichotomies we are not capturing this complexity, and I think this is certainly a big limitation of these value dimensions posing one or the other. Reality is more complex and these frameworks do not capture the paradoxes existing in all cultures. If these dichotomies or the Hofstede dismentionalizations do not provide the best guidance for managers and leaders to navigate a kind of a culture that they are not very well familiar with. What other guidance do they have? Since people usually cling to it because they may be the one concrete thing they have to provide them orientation. I tend to call them sophisticated stereotypes, which is useful as a first kickoff. This is useful to a certain extent. The Hofstede dimensions? The Hofstede dimensions, but in a globalized world, for instance, we can learn different approaches also from China. There is very interesting research done in China. Chinese researchers, for instance, Professor Tony Fang. He used the Yin and Yang approach. I can put on the picture now. It is this very ancient Chinese philosophical way of thinking and the way Tony Fang is conceptualizing cultures is very different than Hofstede. He says, cultures inherently have these paradoxes within them. They are coexisting and with this way, obviously, we have a completely different view. So he says, all cultures have paradoxes, and Only the way they express is different. This is an approach which mirrors our global complexities much better. Think about countries like India, with a very hybrid culture and this also shows us that these paradoxes in cultures are in tension, particularly in emerging countries and it is up to us to understand them, it is like value trump. It is like playing cards, we all have the value cards in our hands and it is according to the situation, to your experience, the play you played before, that determines which card you are pulling out. All cultures have this, that is what Tony Fang is arguing, the same culture values. They just co-exist in different ways. They are probably triggered in different situations. I like his idea of balancing and/or of keeping in mind that there are these different elements that situationally you might come into play. Yes, we have to become aware that we all use implicit theories. Whenever you try to understand across culture, you cannot. We are using an implicit theory to analyze this. Mainly we are mostly not aware that we are doing so, and this is also a little bit short of the mainstream textbooks. Even though there is long standing scientific research to see culture differences and so probably it is a good occasion to speak about it and we should speak much more about it. Which scientific orientations would you highlight saying it is a useful orientation for leaders? There are two very simple categories. You are dichotomizing again, no, I'm just joking. They are actually useful and very longstanding scientific approaches; that is to speak about emic and etic research. Explain that to me. It is been a while for me since I have revisited that. Etic research is basically that you as a researcher are from the outside and you try to find standard, predefined categories, how to classify the culture differences. Hofstede is certainly one of the dominant representatives of this. Whereas on the other hand, if you do emic research, it is basically that you are doing research from inside of the culture. You are more like an ethnographer, who is trying to understand how people think in this discussion, respective to cultures and try to think and pattern, what their ideas are. So they are two different approaches. You impose or you actually kind of grow with them. It's very useful to keep this in mind when you read about culture studies because sometimes also, these etic studies, like Hofstede, or another one like GLOBE. Come also, studying this same phenomenon, come to different results. Hofstede—-Hungary is a very nice example because in Hofstede’s research, Hungary is very low on power distance. If you take the results on power distance from the GLOBE study, Hungary is very high on power distance. How do we make sense of all? What should we believe? What I'm saying is that it is not a question of belief but to understand what is underlying and how we also construct culture questions but most over, I think by using the Yin & Yang approach, that both of these things exist in Hungarian culture and here we see that interpretive studies are very important because they give us an explanation, which is that Hungary has a socialist past and has been very familiar also with dictatorships. That is why people are very delicate towards power distance issues and like low power distance and all the more participative democratic work structure. On the same side, they are still very familiar with Marxist terms of thinking, believing that capitalism is exploiting employees. There is a lot of empirical research which shows that there is a lot of mistrust in Hungarian organizations and this is the reason why you will also find this high power distance category. This is a very nice example. Which very clearly shows how an interpretive study is helping very much to give sense to etic studies. That is why I am saying let us use it complimentarily. Especially because both extremes barely come out of the same political ideology to some degree. So, or a different branches there of. It shows you that you cannot just say communist countries behave like this. There is actually a lot of complexity based on that ideology that comes out of it. Yes. Both the high and the low power distance, for example. Yes. When we are using different methodologies together you see that you come to a much richer result and also interpretive culture analysis explaining the positivist research results and I think we are far too few aware about the regular implicit theories we are always using. That is why culture is a very fuzzy concept and if we want to make it more clear we also need more clarity about the methodologies in analyzing this. Do not be led astray. As in the example that you gave. Which scientific approaches then would you recommend as a useful orientation or important insight for leaders? I quite like very long standing scientific views to see culture, which is that the emic and the etic perception. This is a little scientific of a theory but it can be very useful to introduce this terminology because etic approaches look at culture from an outside perspective trying to define a priori predefined categories and dimensions in order to make culture comparable across a lot of countries. They impose order? Is that the idea? Yes, they try to look for what is universal about the different cultures and create categories in what makes cultures comparable. Very important. Emic research on the other hand, takes a more inside view. The view of an ethnographer, who really tries to understand the culture on its own terms and it is very clear that these interpretive emic researchers are extremely important for a leader because you as a leader in an international environment, want to understand how your employees think. Yes That is why these interpretive studies are extremely important. We have to be more aware of what we are using and consciously also using to complement etic and emic studies. Okay. When we use both, is it that etic provides the general framework and emic just gives us more details? Or are they fundamentally different? I personally see them as very complimentary. Okay. To give you an example to where this complimentary analysis can help us make more sense of existing research. Okay, so what I hear you say is that there are different scientific approaches but they are not just helpful for scientists but they help us question our own way of thinking about cultures. In fact, I think these things have an extremely practical implication because it influences the discourse, how we speak about culture and culture differences and it also has a very practical implication because it is an influence in our way to analyze a cross-culture conflict. If we just rely on one approach you do not get the whole picture. There is always another story. True, and that is why these interpretive approached are so extremely important to foster and for managers to learn much more about how to incorporate this into their everyday management life. Okay. There is a very beautiful quote from James March who says that leadership involves a delicate combination of plumbing and poetry. I like this very much because there is important plumbing for an organization to function. These are the tools the processes and so on but particularly in multicultural leadership, the poetry part is very important. It is up to you to find context, the lines, and find the right words. Find the right poetry. Find the right poem how you want to pose it but actually, on leadership I think it is about. Leadership is always contextual, so it is up to you to find and to contextualize in a well balanced way.
