Meeting the cultural diversity challenges of China’s “One Belt, One Road” plan
Competent intermediaries will have a key role to play in managing cross-cultural business relationships
The inception of China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative has generated enormous interest in the potential investment opportunities it opens up.
But many would-be investors have voiced concerns about the associated risks stemming from the politics of some of the countries encompassed by the strategy. Some regimes along the trade route are considered by many to be essentially dictatorships.
However, these fears fail to take into account the concept of cross-cultural management, even though it links not only to geopolitics but is also a key to commercial success, particularly when more than 60 countries are involved.
Culture has become a widely recognised international management topic since the 1980s, when global business gained its unprecedented popularity. The earlier discussions largely dealt with multinational operations, such as IBM’s human resource management across different nation-states.
Culture has been a widely recognised international management topic since the 1980s
The rise of Japanese outbound investment and China’s massive inward foreign investment quickly steered research on the subject toward contrasting the working values and communication approaches between east and west, giving rise to new management terms such as guanxi - the mutually beneficial relationships central to business in China. Sociocultural dimensions such as individualism, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and paternalism were introduced into cross-cultural management.