itself both in and Companies often approach the process of developing a style substance. global culture as a one way process dominated by corporate headquarters, exemplified by common terms such as transfer,” transmission, “cultural “cultural “cultural penetration,” and dissemination.” In addition, core values often originate at “culture corporate headquarters and fail to reflect and incorporate diverse cultural influences. This approach breeds skepticism about global culture that is often perceived by overseas employees as ethnocentric and parochial. A second often overlooked reason is that thinking about strong global culture has been too heavily influenced by a common model that conceptualizes strong global culture along a linear continuum ranging from “weak” to culture. However, a linear and unidimensional approach is too simplistic to “strong” capture complex cultural realities in MNCs, which are composed of geographically operations and may have of strong culture distributed across the network. “islands” As a result, companies often do not discern nor harness these of cultural “islands” capabilities that may exist across their global operations. Building a strong global culture requires companies to break away from a headquarters-centric and linear way of thinking and to develop a more fine grained understanding of how organizational culture manifests itself across the multinational company. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework that maps of global patterns culture in multinational corporations and identifies assets and mechanisms that companies can use to build a strong global culture that fits with their strategic need. In particular, we view strong global culture as consisting of three interrelated elements: core values and practices that are shared both and organizational units of the within across multinational corporation, specifically across corporate headquarters and overseas
itself both in style and substance. Companies often approach the process of developing a global culture as a one way process dominated by corporate headquarters, exemplified by common terms such as “cultural transfer,” “cultural transmission, “cultural penetration,” and “culture dissemination.” In addition, core values often originate at corporate headquarters and fail to reflect and incorporate diverse cultural influences. This approach breeds skepticism about global culture that is often perceived by overseas employees as ethnocentric and parochial. A second often overlooked reason is that thinking about strong global culture has been too heavily influenced by a common model that conceptualizes strong global culture along a linear continuum ranging from “weak” to “strong” culture. However, a linear and unidimensional approach is too simplistic to capture complex cultural realities in MNCs, which are composed of geographically operations and may have “islands” of strong culture distributed across the network. As a result, companies often do not discern nor harness these “islands” of cultural capabilities that may exist across their global operations. Building a strong global culture requires companies to break away from a headquarters-centric and linear way of thinking and to develop a more fine grained understanding of how organizational culture manifests itself across the multinational company. In this article, we offer a conceptual framework that maps patterns of global culture in multinational corporations and identifies assets and mechanisms that companies can use to build a strong global culture that fits with their strategic need. In particular, we view strong global culture as consisting of three interrelated elements: core values and practices that are shared both within and across organizational units of the multinational corporation, specifically across corporate headquarters and overseas
Rocky_Road_to_Global_Culture_-_Sloan_Submission.docx