ABSTRACT

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, globalization has become a fact of everyday life. More and more people have to interact with individuals from other cultures in shopping malls, educational institutes, and housing complexes. Cross-cultural interactions are especially salient in the business context. To remain competitive, employees, teams, and organizations must operate effectively in multicultural, multinational contexts. Many organizations compete with global corporations without even venturing abroad. The metaphors of a “flat world” (Friedman, 2005) or a “global village” (Ger, 1999) have been used to describe the contemporary business world for the flow of goods, services, and information transcending the boundaries of space and time. Not surprisingly, the acceleration of business globalization has triggered a surging interest in international management research (Tsui, 2007) and has stimulated several stock-taking reviews (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007; Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003; Werner, 2002). These reviews identified some significant advances but also revealed many unresolved issues that have hampered the progress in cross-cultural management research. This chapter draws on the learning from an analysis of 93 cross-national studies of organizational behavior published in the best management and psychology journals, and offers a few modest—and hopefully promising—solutions that may advance progress in this line of work. Although we focus on the organizational literature, researchers in the broader social-science domain face similar challenges. Therefore, we hope our discussion is relevant to scholars working in non-business fields as well.