Differences between national cultures matter - Case of Slovenian-Korean working environment

Abstract

Aims: Global business today usually requires organizations to be present locally in countries where their customers are. To do this successfully, good cooperation with local people is needed. Therefore, this paper focuses on the integration of cultures in the business world. The insights from this study are expected to benefit Slovenian expatriates to foreign companies in South Korea, as well as national culture researchers. The main goals of this research include a comparison of Hofstede's IBM survey results with the researched working environment, and identifying the benefits of merging two national cultures for the working environment. Methods: A questionnaire was distributed to purposive samples within the researched working environments and the collected data analysed used SPSS, where the hypotheses were tested using a chi-square test and t-test for independent samples. Results: The results revealed significant differences between the two national cultures in the working environment, e.g.: fear of expressing disagreement towards superiors, commitment to work, preference of challenges, tendency to avoid conflicts and innovations - all differed according to nationality. Conclusion: Working together with people from different cultures requires a certain amount of adaptation (learning about another culture, expecting situations that are not usual). If this adaptation is successful, then cooperation between the different cultures can also be successful, leading to a potential output that is even better than cooperation between people from the same culture.