Competition or Cooperation: Cultural Perspectives on N-Effect and Proximity-to-a-Standard

摘要

With the escalating globalization of business activities, the issue of how business organizations adapt to cultural differences in host countries and deal with cross-cultural management practices becomes increasingly important for human resource and marketing managers. The failure to take cultural differences into account has been the cause of many businesses' lack of success across national borders (Miroshnik, 2002; Ricks, 2006). Management practices, strategies, structures, as well as technologies that are suitable in one culture may lead to undesirable consequences in another (Miroshnik, 2002). For example, task-driven managerial practices may deliver expected outcomes in countries where the culture promotes competitiveness, whereas it would not be the case in countries where a culture encourages cooperativeness. This study uses the theories of N-effect and proximity-to-a-standard to capture the degree of competitiveness and cooperation among individuals of different cultural settings of the chosen countries. The N-effect is the discovery that increasing the number of competitors (N) can decrease competitive motivation (Garcia and Tor, 2009) meaning that individuals behave more competitively when the number of competitors is small. Proximity-to-a-standard specifies that individuals behave more competitively when they perceive themselves to be close to a reference standard.