Cross-Cultural Research

Pablo Cardona is leading an international network of researchers to promote cross-cultural research at IESE in various fields related to human behavior in organizations such as leadership, motivation, or trust. There are various reasons for his interest in cross-cultural research. First, most people agree that the future will bring an even stronger globalization context in which countries and organizations will have to find better solutions to live and work with a highly diverse population. It is also accepted that the potential benefits of cultural diversity are not always effective due to the complexity that this diversity brings about. These problems demand more research on cross-cultural effects at different levels: society, community, organization, teams, and interpersonal relationships. Second, cross-cultural research has used cultural categories (such as power distance, or masculinity-feminity) to explain differences in behaviors and practices in different cultures. However, this research consists mainly on simple comparisons of results between two or few different cultures in order to find differences with the established models that have been developed in the Western world. The results so far are inconclusive, because this research has been conducted without a proper methodology to identify the underlying cross-cultural influence in the different relationships of the models. The basic problem to measure cultural factors is that they are at a different level of analysis and cannot be measured as a simple new variable in the model. Recently, a new methodology (called Hierarchical Linear Models) has been developed that allows for measurements at different levels of analysis. This new tool gives researchers the opportunity to understand how culture really influences different processes in organizations. The network has started with a first study about trust, organizational citizenship behavior and leadership competencies. A questionnaire has been designed based in two previous PhD dissertations Cardona has directed and is being administered to a large sample of managers and their collaborators in different countries such as France, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Poland, Russia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Brazil.