The key premise is that at the ideographic level, senior managers and leaders become effective across cultures when they are able to reconcile dilemmas they face in their work. At the nomothetic level, dilemmas arise across organizations as soon as they start to market across cultures and/or cope with their increasingly multicultural home markets.
SAMPLING
We took most of our samples from multinational and international companies, headquartered in many different countries. The results were shared with the samples surveyed and we learned much from their comments on our questions. These samples drawn from the variety of organizations reveal functionally equivalent sets, since nearly all these organizations were pursuing similar ends. Gender, age, education, and occupation differences are being case matched, to achieve similar distributions in each subset.
Finally it should be noted that our whole approach was not based on attempting to obtain an orthogonal data set as typified in classical market research. In the latter type of study, a sample is selected (targeted) with the minimum number of cases to obtain full coverage of each attribute (country, age, gender, etc.). This full concept method is not appropriate to our quest because of practical difficulties. How, for example, would we find a young, female, senior Arab leader working in a Gulf Country? We have adopted the approach of collecting a large data set with wide internal variety and then performing a reflective analysis that we can describe as knowledge discovery by induction.
Research instruments have been developed as experimental instruments to discover how the respondents reacted to dilemmas. The dilemma methodology imagines a conflict between two principles, e.g., respect for law versus loyalty among friends. In perhaps 95 percent of all cases, the claims of law and those of friendship coincide, but by imagining a case where these clash (for example, where the terms of a business contract have become idiosyncratic due a change in market conditions), we can discover whether respondents reject reconciliation, or strive to reconcile, or simply abandon their value systems.
FINAL QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGNS
Our questionnaires, being our core instruments, have been and are continually being refined. Multiple choice questions were constructed describing alternate courses of action to respond to dilemmas. The different combinations of answers that can be selected are intended to probe constructs such as:
whether marketers focus on trying to push their own established products in different markets with corresponding different cultures and thus reject attempts at reconciliation;
whether they tend to abandon their attempts to market their established products or services and seek new replacement products and services appropriate to the new markets that fit the culture of these new markets. This is the "when in Rome..." approach (lose-win);
whether marketers seek a compromise position (lose-lose);
whether marketers develop marketing plans that reconcile the differences between the established markets and new markets that have different cultures.
The value systems underlying each dilemma that is posed owe their origin to one of the seven dimensions of Trompenaars model of cross culture. Thus the question can be used to simultaneously identify both their value orientation (e.g., preferences for rules or exceptions, individualism or communitarianism) and their propensity to reconcile.
Thus the total spectrum of dilemma questions provides gives data that is combined in different combinations to a series of scales:
scores on each cross-cultural dimension (i.e. a full cross-cultural profile); and
for each dimension, scores on the propensity to:
compromise,
reject reconciliation,
the degree of seeking reconciliation from one's own cultural orientation first and then accommodating the alternate,
the degree of seeking reconciliation from the alternate cultural orientation first and then accommodating one's own,
and thereby
a total reconciliation score per dimension,
and, in summary
a set of total scores for reconciliation across all cultural dimensions (clockwise and anti-clockwise spirals), rejection and compromise.
The accumulation of the evidence is ongoing. Recently an area of our website (www.cultureforbusiness.com) open to free access that invites online responses to versions of our models has resulted in the number of valid cases increasing exponentially.
QUALITATIVE INTERVIEW DATA
As indicated in the body of this book, we accumulated much unstructured evidence from semi-structured interviews and especially through our WebCue online interviews. We perform a number of content analyses of these texts. These include Concordance Software (Oxford Concordance Program) to obtain KWIC analysis (keyword in context) and word-frequency counts, linguistic analysis (StyleWriter), NUD*IST and similar.
These methods provided a structured approach to assist the qualitative researcher to extract key factors and findings that complemented and reinforced the questionnaire-based research.
DATA MINING
Initial interrogation and analysis of the cross-cultural dilemma database has followed convention using statistical confidence tests.
However the classical approach does not extract all the potential information waiting to be discovered. Are there hidden patterns and exciting concepts deep within the database that would only be revealed if we knew in advance what they were and could test for them? Ongoing research with the database is concerned with mining for such information by using more recent techniques of analysis including neural networks and data mining.
Because much of our primary data on cross-cultural issues of marketing contains much categorical and ordinal data, classical parametric methods could not be used and many such problems are overcome by this new approach. The technique enables the relative contribution of different factors to be determined and is easily transferable to other problems, e.g., the relative importance of attributes of products (such as price, color, style, availability) or services. It thereby achieves the same results for our categorical data as traditional conjoint analysis, so loved by marketers, can play for their parametric market research data.
Trompenaars' model of cross culture is based on seven scales (dimensions) and this serves as the basic framework for conceiving a new approach to marketing across cultures. These scales are composed of a number of combinations of smaller components. We need a method of analysis to probe the relative influence of the different items such as age, gender, religion that were collected. In this respect, even "country" can be considered as simply another categorical item.
In this discussion, our model can be considered in the following form (for each dimension):
dimension score =
c1 × country + c2 × age + c3 × religion + c4 × gender + c5 + ...
It is tempting to "throw" established statistical techniques at the data to identify possible coefficients (cl, c2, c3 etc.) using correlation and partial-correlation analysis or factor analysis. Some other authors have often done just that with their own more limited data sets or incomplete or extracted sets of our earlier data that we have previously published. This has been especially true of researchers whose skills are limited to classical parametric methods - and these are not valid for our data.
On examination of the data, we note that these parametric methods are not appropriate. Many of the data items are simply categories (nominal data) such as gender, religion, or management function. Classical statistical non-parametric methods are not readily available for our particular problem and certainty none are included in industry standard statistical software. Whilst analysis of variance and (categories) conjoint analysis can help with questionnaire design and testing, it cannot produce the analysis we require here.