Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts

Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts introduces readers to the fundamentals of cross-cultural management by exploring the influence of culture on interpersonal interactions in organizational settings and examining the ever-increasing number of cross-cultural challenges that global managers face in today’s workplace.

The Fourth Edition reflects the most current thinking on the topic and includes a series of new features including:

• Enhanced coverage of language issues, offering strategies for improving communication in multinational companies (Ch.6)
• New discussions about the relationship between immigration and international management (Ch. 11)
• Increased emphasis on understanding the mechanisms of cross-cultural interactions
• Best practices for transferring knowledge across cultures (Ch.9)
• Expanded coverage of cross-generational considerations (Ch.11)
• New and updated examples, statistics, discussion questions and references.

The book is complemented by a companion website featuring a range of tools and resources for lecturers, including chapter-specific PowerPoint slides, and a Microsoft Word test bank containing multiple-choice, true/false, and open-ended questions for each chapter.

Suitable reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking Change Management courses.

David C Thomas (PhD University of South Carolina) is a Professor in the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria and Professor Emeritus of International Management at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the author of a dozen books including (with Kerr Inkson) the bestselling Cultural Intelligence, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. His book Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts (2008, Sage Publications) was the winner of the R. Wayne Pace Human Resource Development book of the year award for 2008. In addition, he has edited (with Peter B. Smith and Mark Peterson) The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management Research from Sage Publications. His research on cross-cultural interactions in organizational settings has appeared in the leading journals in the field. He is currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management.

Dr. Thomas’ academic postings have included positions at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), University of New South Wales, the Pennsylvania State University and The University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he was also Director of the Master of International Business Program. He has held visiting positions at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Hawaii, Massey University, New Zealand, and ESCEM, Tours, France. In addition to teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, Dr Thomas has consulted on cultural diversity issues with numerous organizations. When not teaching or writing he can often be found scraping or varnishing or sometimes sailing his 1984 Hans Christian cutter, “Clovelly.”

Mark F. Peterson (PhD, University of Michigan) holds the Hofstede Chair in Cultural Diversity at Maastricht University. He has published over 120 articles and chapters, and several books. The articles have appeared in major management and international management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, Human Relations, Management International Review, Organization Studies, and Organization Science. He has also contributed international management themes to the basic social science literature through chapters in the Annual Review of Psychology, the Communication Yearbook, the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior and an Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies.