Introduction

Working with people of a different culture — whether those differences are due to gender, geography, or corporate style —often involves defining the actions and behaviors a leader wants and then designing work processes that will reinforce those behaviors. As this selection of articles from MIT Sloan Management Review highlights, it also can require examining personal biases about what it means to be a leader or a team member.

From “Rethinking the East Asian Leadership Gap”:

• Many Western multinational corporations operating in East and Southeast Asia bemoan the lack of local leadership talent. But many fast-emerging companies in Indonesia, South Korea, and Malaysia, as well as companies in China and Japan, don’t have that same trouble.
• Senior executives at Western corporate headquarters systematically underestimate the barriers and biases executives from other cultures face in reaching the top.
• Many of the communication qualities considered “leader-like” in Western businesses — a willingness to speak up, express unpopular views, and dominate conversations — run counter to principles that are widely valued in Far Eastern cultures.
• Western companies can leverage differences by rethinking their leadership selection practices and tailoring jobs to the competencies that are required.

From “Negotiating With Chinese Investors”:

• To negotiate effectively with Chinese investors, corporate managers need to understand three things: the environment in which Chinese companies operate, their interests and priorities, and the strategies Chinese investors use at the negotiating table.
• Western executives need to prepare themselves for differences in the nature of negotiations. Although Chinese people generally value harmony and prefer to avoid conflict, negotiations with a Chinese counterpart may not seem harmonious by Western standards.
• During negotiations, Chinese managers don’t consider their counterparts to be either friends or colleagues. They make tougher opening offers, are more intent on finding ways to gain the upper hand, and make more emotional appeals.
• Recent research shows that Chinese negotiators tend to make offers incorporating multiple issues, and they infer the counterpart’s interests and priorities from the changes in offers over the course of the negotiation.

From “Mastering the Make-in-India Challenge”:

• Despite India’s economic growth and potential, developing a successful strategy for the country remains one of the most complex challenges for foreign multinationals.
• Many foreign executives are frustrated that they cannot replicate the same strategies in India that have led to success in China. One reason is that the high-income segment of the population, which is the initial target market for most foreign companies, is relatively small in India compared to China.
• Some successful first-time entrants into India use an approach the authors term the “make-in-India helix.” This strategy involves simultaneously taking advantage of local sourcing, manufacturing, and marketing activities to reach successfully across all of India’s income segments while at the same time developing a springboard for global exports.

From “The Upside of Being a Woman Among ‘Bros’”:

• In business, “bros” typically form tight, exclusive in-group ties. We might assume these groups exclusively favor other males. But they don’t.
• In certain circumstances, managers were actually more responsive to suggestions from opposite-gender subordinates.
• Feeding into this is evidence that employees who speak up with constructive yet change-oriented ideas can be viewed as challenging the manager’s decision-making authority. This is particularly the case with same-gender subordinates.
• Subordinates who emphasize the potential benefits of their suggestions to the manager, thus prompting some gratitude from that manager, might have a better chance of having their suggestions acted upon.

From “How to Change a Culture: Lessons From NUMMI”:

• For almost 30 years, GM and Toyota collaborated on a joint auto plant. John Shook, hired by Toyota in 1983 to work on the new venture, writes that they turned a “once dysfunctional disaster — GM’s Fremont, California, plant — into a model manufacturing plant with the very same workers.”
• NUMMI, an acronym for New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., put an idle plant and workforce back on line and provided GM with a chance to see Toyota’s production system up close. Toyota’s objectives were also “defined by learning rather than by the kinds of tangible business objectives that typically define a joint venture,” writes Shook.
• The lessons from NUMMI are consistent with organizational development expert Edgar Schein’s model of corporate culture: That the way to change culture is to change cultural artifacts — the observable data of an organization, which include what people do and how they behave.
• This article was awarded the 2011 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize for outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development.

From “The Need for Culture Neutrality”:

• Companies today work with an incredibly diverse array of people. To thrive, these organizations need culturally neutral, globally coherent leadership standards.
• These standards should promote needed outcomes without prescribing behaviors, since some behaviors are outside of the cultural norms in some countries.
• Significant advantage will accrue to companies that prepare their people for truly global leadership — and do it earlier in employees’ careers than ever before.

From “How Global Is Your C-Suite?”:

• The vast majority of the world’s largest corporations are run by CEOs native to the country in which the company is headquartered.
• Some studies indicate that national diversity in the top management team can be associated with better performance.
• Moreover, the presence — or absence — of non-native executives in a company’s top management team sends signals about the long-term career prospects for foreign middle managers and potential new hires.
• In 2013, only 67 of the Fortune Global 500 companies had foreign CEOs — almost the same number as in 2008. Also striking is a demographic trend in the top ranks of the 34 companies that had non-native CEOs in 2008 and had hired new CEOs by 2013: More than half of them (18) had another non-native CEO in 2013. In other words, there appears to be an acculturation effect — once a company gets used to having a non-native CEO, it is much more likely to accept non-natives in the future.

From “On the Rocky Road to Strong Global Culture”

• A strong global culture is the exception rather than the rule. As companies expand globally, corporate culture often lags behind, remaining too headquarters-centric to pull together far-flung operations.
• It’s not easy to build a strong organizational culture worldwide — but “cultural hubs” beyond headquarters can help.
• A cultural hub is a unit, a group of people, a network, a function, or a subsidiary within a multinational corporation that has the ability to help shape the company’s core cultural values and assist in localizing them.
• Companies that successfully develop a strong global culture do not shy away from reviewing and re-articulating their core values. They do not view such a process as a sign of cultural weakness.