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Cultural attitudes can have important implications for business

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Cultural attitudes can have important implications for business.  Some of the most influential research on culture and the workplace was carried out by Hofstede (1991;2001).  His study, the largest that had been conducted, surveyed over 100,000 workers in IBM subsidiaries in 40 countries looking for cultural explanations of differences in employee attitudes and behavior.  He concluded that the norms and values embedded in national culture were a very powerful influence on the workplace, and that different approaches would be necessary when managing people from different cultural backgrounds.  Hofstede (1994) concludes that the workplace can only change people's values to a limited extent.  The message for multination companies was that they would be unwise to assume that an organizational culture that was successful in the cultural context, for example of the USA, would be equally successful in a completely different cultural context in say, China.  Hofstede's work (2007) also contains another message for multinationals.  He contends that countries, especially big countries like China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil do not have a single national culture but a variety of cultures that can vary significantly from region to region.  A similar point could be made for smaller countries, in Western Europe for instance, where different cultures may be based on ethnic group rather than region. 
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