8.1. CORPORATE CULTURE BIAS

Managers' national preferences always influence the style and structure of their performance reviews. This is true even when there is a universal, headquarters-mandated system. How many managers, international or national, complain about the headquarters model and later "do their own thing" behind their office doors? Managers, whether expatriate or local, who do not have broad cross-cultural and global diversity exposure will remain in their own cultural comfort zone and use the home-country approach. Such behaviors, unwittingly fueled by one's nationality or civilizational heritage, open the door to discrimination. Some corporate training departments have decreased rater bias through mandated training programs that align diversity, skill building in cross-cultural communication, and global awareness training. Notwithstanding these efforts, the design of performance management systems may retain cultural biases. Both the personal and the systemic issues need to be addressed.

Some companies adamantly believe that a universal and standardized performance management process guarantees fairness, a value that American and British nationals unquestionably share. This approach has been partially successful in companies where large numbers of home country expatriate managers transferred the corporate culture and implanted their performance management process. Managers installed these "foreign" systems in the "field" with only cosmetic cultural changes. This approach pushed the discriminating biases deeper. You cannot incorporate diversity into the business if you do not allow it to surface and be acknowledged. Those systems rewarded the employees whose profiles best suited the universal headquarters' profile, rather than that of the region. Unfortunately, corporations have done little to identify what they have to gain in intellectual capital if they use a performance management system that allows local and national styles to surface, be used, and ultimately be introduced in other locations or business units. Just as we transfer products across borders, a GPMS should allow for the transfer of performance capital as well as the diversity lessons of a global workforce.