International Management

As product life cycles continue to shorten and the rate of technology diffusion increases, the strategic importance of alliances to international firms rises. This strategic phenomenon has impelled firms to seek alliances across borders and cultures. However, these alliances are confronted by many problems arising from differences in national culture, organizational culture, core competencies, and strategic objectives.

Recently Fortune 7, an American company in the food and apparel industry began expansion into the Chinese and African market for the first time. Certainly, one of the aims is expressing those humanistic and community centered values they express in America. Similar to many multinational corporations, top management had very limited awareness of how to reach the aim and how to use these new culture as a source of competitive advantage. To conceptualize culture, we employ Schwartz and Bilsky's theory of the universal structure of values. This theory suggests that there are three universal human requirements: biological-based needs, social interaction requirements, and institutional demands for group protection. These three requirements "preexist any individual" and therefore can be used to conceptually organize human values, or define, what the authors refer to as the "structure" of human values that is common for all cultures. According to this theory, the structure of values is based on end states or modes of behavior, individual, collective, or mixed interests, and motivational domains. Motivational domains are specific types of motivational concerns that the various values express.

While national groups may attach different levels of importance on particular values, the values themselves generally appear to reflect the same motivational domains across these groups. In summary, the values structure remains quite stable across cultural groups.