International Human Resource Management-MJ Version

Annika faces divergent cultural meanings

In a Swedish organization, Annika, one of the managers of the international

trainee programme, is organizing the meeting aimed at clarifying decision-

making procedures for the recruitment of new trainees for Sweden. In the

meeting room, participants are from three different hierarchical levels and

many nationalities. Everyone is entitled to give her/his opinion and everyone

does. Very quickly, it seems that three groups form. Most of the Swedish

participants don’t wish to ‘formalize’ things. Many North American participants

are neither against nor in favor but discuss the necessity to write down

‘rules’. The southern Europeans present in the room tend to be in favor of

rules. They claim the necessity to clarify the recruitment process that many of

them see as unclear. The end of the meeting approaches and no consensus

has been reached. The meeting ends with a lot of frustration; the southern

Europeans accusing the Swedes of keeping things secret and political, the

Swedes upset at the way southern Europeans want to impose strict rules and

control on everyone.

In this case, the Swedes expressed their wish to keep things flexible by

avoiding the formalization that follows the establishment of rules. The North

Americans insisted on the need to call for rules, for the same reasons: ‘Once

you have rules, you are supposed to follow them.’ The southern Europeans

defended the idea of establishing rules in order to have a clear statement on

what people are ‘ideally’ supposed to do: ‘The rules are a clear departure

point for the interpretation of what to do. If we don’t have a clear statement

to start with, everything is too vague.’ Consequently, participants ́ shared

meanings regarding the term ‘rules’ were very different, ranging from: rules

are something you have to follow(to the letter), to a rule is a statement that

you are supposed to interpret according to the situation.

4 LANE, DISTEFANO AND MAZNEVSKI’S ADAPTATION

OF KLUCKHOHN AND STRODTBECK

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s ‘Values Project’ (1961) provides a presentation of
cultural variations within the ‘Cultural orientations framework’. Their project
compares the responses of different communities in the American Southwest
to five universal ‘problems’: relationship of humans to nature, to time, to other
humans, belief about basic human nature and perceived natural mode of
acting. Like Hofstede, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck gave priority to the study of
values. They differ however on the extent to which they use cultural dimen-
sions that contain more variations.
Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s study has been adapted and discussed
for cross-cultural management by Lane, DiStefano and later together with

156 International Human Resource Management