Paper info

Business relationships: cross-cultural analysis

Maria de Lurdes Veludo, Sharon Purchase and Sid Lowe

The paper was published at the 18th IMP-conference in Perth, Australia in 2002.

Culture is an important aspect of business relationships and investigation of the impact ofculture within relationships is becoming more common within the IMP group ofresearchers (Fang and Kriz 2000). This research considers whether attitudes towardsnational culture at the micro-level are consistent with those developed at the macro-levelby Hofstede (1980). Data was collected from Hong Kong and Portugal, vastly different ingeographical and cultural heritage, but according to Hofstede (1980) similar in thecultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism and power distance. The attitudesdisplayed by the micro-level actors did indicate national cultural characteristics wereconsistent with Hofstede (1980) in some cases giving partial support to the researchpropositions. The effect of organizational culture within the Portuguese case, stronglyinfluenced attitudes of the actors and in the individualism/collectivism cultural dimensionwere not consistent with that expected from the ranking given by Hofstede (1980).