The Cross-Cultural Challenges of GlobalizationThis contribution deals with the role of leadership and cross-cultural business relationship management between Europe and China. It will deal with the question of how to build relationships with people in foreign countries and secondly how to establish successful business leadership based on those cross cultural relations. With increasing cross-border ventures of multinational enterprises and increasing numbers of medium-sized businesses, the importance of intercultural competence has been emphasised more and more not only by cultural experts, but also by business strategists. Thus this article will take a more general approach to culture, especially the Chinese one. It will be shown that different values and beliefs may lead to inter-cultural conflict and cause misunderstanding in a multinational environment, affecting the relations between Europeans and Chinese people. For the purpose of building successful relationships and leading organizations in cross-cultural environments, managers must obtain a basic knowledge of intercultural communication and use the approach as a tool in practice. It seems obvious that improving intercultural competence belongs to the core challenges for corporate leaders in the 21st century. A picture of the Chinese cultural background will be presented in order to identify the value changes of this country. It is therefore necessary to analyse the Chinese cultural setting and the importance of adaptation of the Western management model in building relations with Chinese. It will be shown that the closer a new idea is to the traditional attitudes and values, the easier it is to make people be willing to accept change and foreign influence. But it may take a long time for the people with the older tradition and more complex cultural settings to recognise advantages of the new over the old before they will accept the new ideas. We furthermore assume that all leadership is based on relationships. Relations may be of formal and organizational nature in the first level, such as organizational charts, hierarchies or needs of collaboration. On the other hand, from the first time people get in touch, relationships will become subjective in one way or another. This means cognitive and emotional elements like involvement, reception, emotions, intentions, trust or distrust will affect the relationships between two individuals and their behaviour in leadership situations deeply. Even the strongest formal authority can be undermined by frictions on a subjective level, such dislike, distrust or simply the inability to communicate properly. Furthermore we assume that the cultural background of the individuals involved has a deep and formative impact on the relations and leadership situations between them. The more significant the cultural distance, the more difficulties the leaders in business and administration will face in estimating the needs and aspirations of their peers and partners from other areas of our world. For Europeans it should be more than obvious that cultures differ from country to country, from region to region and even from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. We all can see that European countries are divided by numerous invisible borderlines, differences in social status, languages and dialects, in religions and ethnical backgrounds, traditions and attitudes. Also China is not as monolithic as it may appear from our Euro-centric view of our world and the business culture is definitely not the logical extension of the European one. Since reform and open-door policy many Western enterprises have established their businesses in China because of its striking economic development in recent years. However, a viewpoint which emphasises the opportunity provided by Chinas large market while ignoring the complexities of its cultural system is disorientating for foreign managers, especially for first-time foreign investors. Extensive intercultural exchange has made cultural adjustment in business relationships and leadership issues a significant topic. Studies of intercultural contact are concerned with the investigation of how members of different cultures behave in relation to one another. Intercultural relations offer broad terms encompassing studies such as intercultural communication and cross-cultural psychology, and so forth. [74] Our objective is to show how fundamentally the differences in cultural backgrounds do affect human relationships and especially leadership relations. Furthermore the importance of the adaptation of management models in leading people and building relations in China will be outlined. Cultural DifferencesCultural Differences in GeneralBiological scientists treat humans as species, whereas social scientists treat them as unique cultural beings. While other animals continue to live and act within a natural environment, humans have developed themselves in culture. [60] Figure 1 implies that on the one hand culture should be distinguished from human nature, and on the other hand from personality of an individual. Human nature is the commonality all human beings have feelings of fear, anger, love, joy, sadness etc. Human nature is inherited. Yet, how one behaves in showing and expressing these feelings is influenced by culture. Culture is learned. Personality is an individuals unique personal set of mental programmes which is not shared with any other human being. Personality is partly inherited and partly learned. [26] Human Nature, Culture and Personality Source: taken from Hofstede, G. 1991, p. 6. What is culture? This term has been defined in many ways. One of the most well-known anthropological consensus definitions runs as follows: »Culture consists of patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional i.e. historically derived and selected ideas and especially their attached values.« [27] Culture is basically the product of any human association people meet, communicate, interact and in so doing they create cultures. Nothing different to what people do in business or leadership situations. People of any country have certain core beliefs of reality, which manifest themselves in their behaviour. All nations have their own value interpretations. A system of values shared by most citizens of a country is national culture. [32] There are different cultures in different regions and different countries; even within one country there exist various subcultures. An important study in the cultural field is the comparison of core values of national cultures. The Chinese are found to behave differently from the Europeans, Americans and others by comparing core values. The first contact with another culture could be troublesome. Some difficulties can be sensed at once; others may only be perceived after a long time. Relationship across CulturesDifferences in cultural relations have attracted more and more attention of many economists. Understanding local business rituals and designing adequate leadership as well as management style are therefore a vitally important task in todays business world. The sinologists Ames and Hall propose a model of cognitive and social patterning that differentiates the Western sense of order from the Chinese: the Western order tends to value the logical and the Chinese the aesthetic. While logical order emphasises the generality and absolute substitutability, aesthetic order centres on the direction of particularity and uniqueness. The significant aspect of the Chinese version is the emphasis on balance, harmony and relatedness. All of these aspects speak of to a willingness to tolerate, even prefer complexity both cognitively and socially.[56] Value Orientation and Decision Making The following case study will indicate the different styles in decision making between Chinese and Western managers, reflecting the impact of different value orientations of aesthetic vs. logical orders. The selected object is Shenglong Automobile Company, a joint venture established in 1994 by Chinese Dongfeng Automobile Group and French Automobiles Citroen. In order to solve the special problems, the company called them Y2K problems, in all of the companys facilities a business programme was drawn up. The person initially in charge of the implementation was a Chinese manager who decided to find solutions by delegating authority to each department concerned with this problem. A meeting was called, at which he appointed a leader for each department and encouraged them to use their own expertise and equipment to solve the problems. However, this plan of action was not approved by the French management. A manager from Citroen proposed another approach a few weeks later. He convened concerned departments, wrote down the issues of the Y2K problem and appointed a leader for each department. After that, a number of meetings were held and the potential problems were discussed. Subsequently several alternative solutions were raised and finally the optimal one was selected. Time table and time period were determined for the achievement of the solution and the responsibility and deadline for each department were confirmed. During interviews with the managers at Shenglong it was learnt that the Chinese side would have prefered to omit the discussion on obvious solutions as much as possible. Thus if the Chinese side had been responsible for decision making, the procedure would have been shorter, since some problems and solutions are readily apparent and there is no need to select an optimal one. In comparison with the Chinese counterpart the French side centres on decision making by discussion to provide references for better implementation and control. As stated before the attributes of the Chinese preference tend to be the direction of particularity and uniqueness. And therefore each department should use their own wisdom to find solutions to problems and the solutions are allowed to differ from each other, which does not mean that the subordinates can relax. On the contrary, it is rather a test of their responsibility. The attributes of the Western preference tend to be the direction of generality and substitutability. In the Western perspective the situation can be fitted into a matrix that serves as an analytical model and provides experiences for future decision making. It can be said that the Western trajectory is towards a high level of information codification and diffusion to reduce the complexity of problems while the Chinese towards information diffusion at a higher level of shared cognitive similarity. There is a whimsical metaphor stated by a Chinese manager in relation to this case study: The different ways of decision making between the Chinese and the Western in this case French managers imply different cultural background. In Chinese fairy stories the immortals are imagined to be able to fly by playing clouds and mist standing for aesthetic order while Western angels are imagined to be able to fly by flapping two wings standing for logical order.[75] In this connection it must be clearly stated that this article does not intend to provide an absolute scientific correlation between the metaphor and concrete human behaviour, which is to be examined in another study at another time. However, the metaphor seems to support what the two sinologists Ames and Hall have identified the aesthetic order of the Chinese and the logical order of the Western people. [Die Leseprobe endet hier] | 
Cross-Cultural Leadership, built on Relations
