University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Managing People Across Cultures
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Managing People Across Cultures

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner
Capstone, 2004
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Analytical
  • Background
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner cite interesting facts and studies as they discuss various facets of human resource management in an effort to bring HR departments closer to the daily lives and daily work of their diverse employees. They cover including change, motivation, recruitment, assessment tools, managing teams, organizational learning, leadership development and diversity, all with some attention to cross-cultural issues. Even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp, pulling all these elements together in a diverse organization remains a worthwhile goal.  

Summary

Corporate cultures include differing values that must be reconciled so people can work together.

Corporate cultures are living systems with built-in defense mechanisms for self-preservation. While corporate cultures are difficult to identify at first blush, they consist of commonly held assumptions that are invented, developed and discovered by people within the organization.

As a result of the specific traits of each of the four kinds of modern hybrid corporate cultures, organizations are difficult to change. Each type of distinct corporate culture is suited to specific business purposes. These four types of cultures vary along two continuums: from being egalitarian to being hierarchical, and from emphasizing the role of the individual to being task-oriented.

The four types of cultures are:

  1. The Incubator — This very egalitarian culture emphasizes individual contributions. It values creativity highly since anyone can develop a powerful, profitable product at any time. The Incubator primarily launches new products and does not often develop and manage labor-intensive functions, such as manufacturing, sales and...

About the Authors

Fons Trompenaars is director of Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner, an intercultural management firm. He wrote or co-wrote several books, including Did the Pedestrian Die?, Leaders for the 21st Century and Riding the Waves of Culture. Charles Hampden-Turner, the author of 18 books, is a senior research associate at Cambridge University. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard Business School, he is a former Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities fellow and a visiting professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Business School.

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