The role of national culture in choosing a change strategy in organizations

Abstract

In this paper, the causal relationship between certain dimensions of a national culture and certain organizational change strategies are analyzed. The paper uses two of the four dimensions of national culture, identified by G. Hofstede: the power distance and masculinity-femininity ones. On the other hand, the four organizational change strategies have been differentiated: the coercive strategy, the normative-re-educative strategy, the rational-empirical strategy and the creative strategy. The identified dimensions of national culture and the identified organizational change strategies differ from one another with respect to the same criteria: the distribution of power and task orientation versus people orientation. Based on this fact, it is possible to establish eight hypotheses about a causal relationship between certain types of national cultures and certain organizational change strategies. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]