ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, Fons Trompenaars emerged as a respected theorist who contributed complementary cultural dimensions to the field of cross-cultural management. Together with Charles Hampden-Turner, he established a consultation firm called the Centre for International Business Studies, and, since then, they have worked with numerous leading multinational corporations (MNCs) including British Petroleum, Philips, IBM, Heineken, AMD, Mars, Motorola, General Motors, Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, ABN AMRO, ING, PepsiCo, and Honeywell. They have also conducted more
than a thousand cross-cultural training programs in 20 countries. In late 1990s, due to his wide-ranging consultation work, Trompenaars was ranked as one of the top management consultants, among other gurus like Tom Peters, Edward de Bono, Michael Porter, and Peter Drucker. He developed his understanding of cultural influences on organizations based on his years of consultation and practice rather than on scholarly work, contrary to other cross-cultural theorists like Hofstede, Hall, Kluckhorn, and Strodtbeck. Between 2011 and 2013, he became one of the top 20 most influential thinkers in human resources management and enlightened scholars on many aspects of culture and its influence in the workplace. His inquisitive mind explored how people’s approaches to solving problems at work are shaped and influenced by their own cultural values and why people from different cultures see the world differently, rooted in a dynamic cultural values orientation.
