Cultural Adaptation: A Shared Responsibility

What is the domain of these new integrating staff members? They must ensure that all decisions and actions of the firm in and affecting foreign societies are compatible with those societies’ cultures. This would range from the strategic decisions that might be made by managers at the firm’s headquarters to the behavior of a subsidiary manager while negotiating with host national suppliers or labor representatives. This is not to argue that managers, both those assigned to headquarters offices and those assigned to foreign subsidiaries, should not be as culturally aware as possible. Nor is it to say that the cultural dimension should not be a factor in their decisionmaking processes. It is to say, however, that both the importance and difficulty of comprehensively including the cultural factor precludes this from being the domain solely of general and other functional managers. The decisions and behaviors of these traditional managers must now be monitored and guided by cultural functional specialists, just as the legal functional specialists oversee the legal aspects of decisions and actions. In the same manner that a firm would not set up and run a foreign subsidiary without appropriate advice on the legal nature of the host society, they can no longer afford to conduct those operations without appropriate advice on the cultural nature of the society.

Some may believe that this kind of advice has always been sought by managers and that there is no need to formalize it as a separate organizational function. David Bruce, director of the International Business Council at Georgia State University, has noted several informal ways that firms seek to get the necessary adaptation information. Foreign firms, for example, have often relied on their local lawyers for cultural adaptation advice. A number of foreign firms in the United States have also relied on Georgia State University, which offers an orientation program for those firms seeking help in getting started. Bruce notes, also, that the cultural integration role is often handled informally by a firm’s local national vice-president.

The inadequacy of an informal approach, however, is attested to by the number of cultural blunders that firms continue to make. Also, as Lawrence and Lorsch stated in their argument for intraorganizational. integrators, “if an organization needs integrators at all, it is preferable to legitimize these roles by formal titles and mis- sions rather than to leave them in an informal status”. In their study, they found that the effectiveness of the informal integrators was severely impaired. It is through a formal identification of these roles that the activities of integrators are seen by all as legitimate.