Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we examined traditional HRD, HPT, and OD approaches to performance improvement and suggested that they might be more successful in international locations if they are designed with national cultural considerations in mind.  We unpacked the three principal performance improvement approaches to identify five basic assumptions and propose that these assumptions might not be valid in many international environments. We argued that performance improvement interventions that may have been overwhelmingly successful in North American organizations could fail in international locations, due to divergence in national cultural attitudes regarding authority, task, relationships, environmental control, and social relationships, among other things.  Our intent was to expand upon current thinking in the performance improvement field by bringing to it a model of national cultural influences and to discuss how performance improvement approaches might be modified to divergent international environments.

There is considerable debate, however, regarding the degree to which organizational processes become homogeneous, or more convergent, as an organization becomes more international.  The argument for convergence is based on the idea that the demands of industrialization, competition, and worldwide integration factor out any national or cultural differences in organizational processes, technology, and structure (Child, 1981).  Many have observed that global organizations and their leaders are powerful agents for convergence as they bring cultural beliefs from the parent country to the host or partner country into organizational management practices.  For example, the influence of Western management practices on the Arabian Gulf region, brought largely by expatriate managers, is strong.  Observers now note that even local, national managers tend to use a type of participative management, which is not a common technique in this region (Al-Jafary & Hollingsworth, 1983).  Many companies in Asia, including very traditional Korean firms, are hungry for advice from Western consultants that will help them restructure operations, divest poorly performing units, and even “rightsize” their workforces (Clifford, 1999).  These same consultants are helping Western firms do business in Asia, too.

The convergence argument, however, competes strongly with the argument for divergence.  Those who believe in divergence argue that the effects of national and regional culture on organizations will remain very evident, particularly at the level of individual and personal behavior, and may also depend on external factors such as the country's stage of development, its location, and its propensity to change (Webber, 1969).  In different cultural situations, different assumptions about the roles of organizational systems may apply.   Further, there has been growth of intra-country fragmentation, leading to increased segmentation of national markets and differentiation of management practices within countries (Segal-Horn, 1996).  For example, China is widely diverse geographically, racially, ethnically, and socially.  People in the major Han group of China have said that people living just six miles away were foreigners (De Mente, 1994: 173), so one should expect to find significant differences among Chinese people. 

Even the concept of human resource management, which assumes that people can be deployed and maximized like capital or raw material, is a uniquely American concept that is not necessarily shared by organizations worldwide  (Brewster & Bournois, 1991).  In the discussion of convergence versus divergence, a convincing argument can be made that while convergence of management styles may occur at the macro and strategic levels of many organizations, the divergent effects of national culture are most strongly felt at the level of human resource management and individual performance improvement.

This presents a particular challenge to researchers and practitioners in the performance improvement field.  Decades of work in performance improvement have shown that sustainable, positive results in large North American organizations have occurred as a result of systemic interventions (Dean, 1999).  Esque and Patterson (1998) identify a number of case studies that document performance improvement in the specific areas of productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, competitiveness, and cost efficiency.

It may be that systemic performance improvement approaches are fundamentally sound, but the delivery methods will need to be adjusted to be understood and embraced by people in organizations in other countries and regions.  Adjusting the delivery of performance improvement interventions to local cultures and attitudes would be particularly important for companies using the multidomestic corporate-level strategy as discussed by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) or the "insider" strategy as discussed by Ohmae (1990).  For multidomestic or "insider" organizations, knowledge tends to be developed and retained within each individual unit as part of the strategic intent to be locally responsive.  The parent organizations of multidomestic firms often have minimal involvement in the management procedures and processes of subsidiary organizations.  This means that if the parent wants to transfer important performance improvement competencies to subsidiaries, it must make a special effort to insure that competencies are adapted to local situations. 

For some organizations, it may not be as imperative to adjust performance improvement delivery to local cultures and attitudes.  Take, for example, organizations that use an international or global corporate-level strategy, as discussed by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989), or organizations dedicated strictly to export activity, as discussed by Ohmae (1990).  Firms that use the international strategy or export create value by transferring skills and products to foreign markets where domestic firms lack them.  The parent company that uses the international strategy exports its knowledge, as well as its products, to overseas units.  There are few, if any, employees in overseas locations, aside from distributors who are not normally considered part of the exporting organization.  Firms using the global strategy work hard to integrate operations across all overseas units and keep costs under strict control.  Knowledge is developed and retained at headquarters, and overseas operations are expected to implement it without much adaptation (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1989).  It could be argued that the global integration strategy assumes that knowledge transfer and learning by subsidiaries will converge with and adapt to that of headquarters—not the other way around.  Figure 1 illustrates the four strategies and the dimensions by which they vary.

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We predict that the adaptation of performance improvement delivery methods to local cultural differences will be easiest and most appropriate for firms that follow a transnational (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1989) or fully globalized (Ohmae, 1990) strategy.  In these organizations, knowledge and know-how is routinely developed jointly and shared among subsidiaries worldwide.  The transnational organization seeks out the different contributions made by national units and integrates them after some adaptation to local conditions into worldwide operations (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1989).  The transnational organization is pressured to integrate operations worldwide to keep costs low and at the same time must be highly responsive to local market and subsidiary culture.  Transnational organizations continuously encounter friction as they try to reconcile these apparently contradictory forces, but somehow they are committed to achieving a balance.  This suggests that best practices in performance improvement that have been discovered in North America, or anywhere, more likely would be welcomed by organization members of foreign subsidiaries of transnational firms, because of their greater experience and tolerance for both change and adaptation.