4. What problems do you think he would have anticipated in conducting research i

Question

4.      What problems do you think he would have anticipated in conducting research into national cultures that his literature review may not have highlighted?

(Use peer-reviewed references. At least 250 words!!!)

Summary: National Culture and Management Styles Petro decided to research cross-cultural management. He was interested particularly in national cultures and wished to compare and contrast differences between Britain, France and Nigeria in terms of their management theory and practices. He spent several days in the university library searching the online catalogue for information on national cultures in order to make comparisons between the countries selected for his project. He also used the internet search engine Google and was taken by surprise to find over 50 million hits on 'national cultures'. He was aware of the research of Hofstede and Trompenaars from his third-year studies. Google highlighted 159,000 hits on Hofstede and 77,000 on Trompennars. Given the numbers involved he quickly realized how time consuming this would be. Discussing this with a fellow student alerted him to the problems of such date. Apart from the fact that commercial and academic information was not easily differentiated, much of the information was not referenced in the way expected for his academic project. Nevertheless, given the problems he had in selecting the appropriate data on cross-cultural differences in management, he arrived at his first tutorial with a range of material for his literature review. This included photocopied extracts from textbooks on management theories and practices and copies of the articles from a variety of journals. He realized that there was a lot more data on Britain and France compared to Nigeria. However, he perceived that his managerial experience in Britain and France as well as his three years working in Nigeria for a large multinational company would give him insights that were valuable for his project. Petro emailed his project tutor his written work so far on his literature review. He was careful to make what he thought were interesting and meaningful comparisons between the three countries and assemble them in chronological order of publication. He felt pleased that he had already written 3000 words towards the 10,000 words he needed for his project report.

Explanation / Answer

Apart from the problems faced by Petro some of the difficulties which he may have anticipated but did not mention in his literature review are:-

Britain and France are very individualist countries. However, Nigeria is collectivist, so the way the collected data is to be interpreted would vary in both the case as the aim of the project was to understand the way culture influences attitudes and managerial decision making in specific situations. However, most of the research that he was doing as elucidated in the text is secondary and is hence subject to various biases of the authors and researchers as a result of which he would have to do a lot of thorough research from numerous sources before coming to a particular conclusion. One of the other issues that he might have faced is that of translation. Texts written in a native language may be interpreted in numerous ways once it is translated, however the best way to get an authentic meaning from a text is to run it by a person who is well versed with that language , so , Petro might have had to take help from French and Nigerian locals to best interpret the research available in their native language. Some part of the research conducted by Petro might have required him to design a questionnaire, which again would have been difficult for him keeping in mind the way people in these cultures respond to the questions and the way they should be worded. Doing primary research also involves problems related to ethics which he might not have anticipated.

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