Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts

The globalization of the business environment that is being driven by technological and economic factors is resulting in an ever-increasing number of cross-cultural interactions in the workplace. Understanding the influence of culture on interpersonal interactions in organizational settings is now a fundamental requirement of effective international management. This book will be an aid to that understanding.

The Third Edition examines cross-cultural management issues from a predominantly psychological perspective. As opposed to being country specific, this book focuses on the interactions of people from different cultures in organizational settings. That is, the approach used is to understand the effect of culture in a way that can then be applied to a wide variety of cross-cultural interactions in a number of organizational contexts.

David C Thomas (PhD University of South Carolina) is a Professor in the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria and Professor Emeritus of International Management at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the author of a dozen books including (with Kerr Inkson) the bestselling Cultural Intelligence, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. His book Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts (2008, Sage Publications) was the winner of the R. Wayne Pace Human Resource Development book of the year award for 2008. In addition, he has edited (with Peter B. Smith and Mark Peterson) The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management Research from Sage Publications. His research on cross-cultural interactions in organizational settings has appeared in the leading journals in the field. He is currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management.

Dr. Thomas’ academic postings have included positions at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), University of New South Wales, the Pennsylvania State University and The University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he was also Director of the Master of International Business Program. He has held visiting positions at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Hawaii, Massey University, New Zealand, and ESCEM, Tours, France. In addition to teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, Dr Thomas has consulted on cultural diversity issues with numerous organizations. When not teaching or writing he can often be found scraping or varnishing or sometimes sailing his 1984 Hans Christian cutter, “Clovelly.”

Mark F. Peterson (PhD, University of Michigan) holds the Hofstede Chair in Cultural Diversity at Maastricht University. He has published over 120 articles and chapters, and several books. The articles have appeared in major management and international management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, Human Relations, Management International Review, Organization Studies, and Organization Science. He has also contributed international management themes to the basic social science literature through chapters in the Annual Review of Psychology, the Communication Yearbook, the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior and an Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies.

His previous positions have been at Wayne State University, the University of Miami, Texas Tech University, and Florida Atlantic University. He has had visiting positions supported by Fulbright Fellowships to Osaka University and McMaster University, and he held the John R. Galvin Chair at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He has also had visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Aarhus University. Along with Mikael Soendergaard, Geert Hofstede, Michael Minkov, Gert Jan Hofstede, and others, he teaches an annual summer Ph.D. master class in cross cultural management at various locations in Europe. When at his home in Homestead, Florida, he spends his weekends tending to a collection of orchids and making orchid hybrids.