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But just how universal are these management solutions? Are these
“truths”about what effective management really is – truths that can be
applied anywhere, under any circumstances?

Even with experienced international companies many well-intended
universal applications of management theory have turned out badly.
For example, pay-for-perfomance has in many instances been a failure
on the African continent because there are particular, though
unspoken, rules about the sequence and timing of reward and
promotions.

Similarly, management-by-objectives schemes have generally failed
within subsidiaries of multinationals in southern Europe, because
managers have not wanted to conform to the abstact nature of
preconceived policy guidelines.

Even the notion of human resource management is difficult to
translate to other cultures, coming as it does from a typically Anglo-
Saxon doctrine. It borrows from ecomnomics the idea that human
beings are resources like physical and monetary resources. It tends to
assume almost unlimited capacities for individual development. In
countries without these beliefs, this concept is hard to grasp and
unpopular once it is understood.

International managers have it tough. They must operate on a number
of different premises at any one time. These premises arise from their
culture of origin, the culture in which they are working, and the
culture of organisation which employs them.

In every culture in the world such phenomena as authority,
bureaucracy, creativity, good fellowship, verification, and
accountability are experienced in different ways. That we use the
same words to describe them tends to make us unaware that our
cultural biases and our accustomed conduct may not be appropriate, or
shared.

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