Culture and management in Malaysia

Malaysia is an important case for the analysis of management and culture in Asia. No other country exemplifies such a strong example of the practicalities of managing cultural diversity, with three ethnically distinct communities, the Malays, approximately 60 per cent, the Malaysian Chinese, 30 per cent and the Malaysian Indians ¹ and others, 10 per cent. This ‘plural society’ arose as a result of British colonial rule (Shamsul 1997a). The juxtaposition of two large and quite distinct socio-cultural entities, the Malays and the Chinese, means that managers and employees with quite different values and daily lifestyles must cooperate in the context of modern organizations, without a clear hegemony by one group’s culture based on sheer numbers. Although the Malay culture, focused around the belief in Islam, has a degree of hegemony based on political factors and Malaysia’s development planning imperatives, this is tempered with the ‘Confucian dynamism’ of Chinese culture, whose values are not unappreciated by the Malay ruling elite, but have been nevertheless incorporated into management cultures through a third-party avenue, the ‘Look East Policy’ (LEP) which focused on Japan and Korea. ²