Abstract
National culture can be defined as the set of norms, values, and beliefs that people from a certain nation have in common and that describes their identity, making them different from people from other nations. Individuals who live in a particular cultural environment may behave in a way they assume is right, but others, who live in a different context, may consider their actions inconvenient or may not comprehend them. Misunderstanding what occurs in a different culture may cause uneasiness, especially when the language and the behavioral norms differ from the ones people are accustomed to. Taking the risk of disowning ideas that have always been regarded as true is not normally convenient.
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An alliance is a voluntary arrangement among independent firms to exchange or share resources and engage in the co-development or provision of products, services, or technologies (Gulati 1998). Alliances take different forms, including joint ventures, collaborative R&D, and joint marketing. Traditionally, alliances had been conceived of as ad hoc arrangements serving specific needs, but more recently firms have begun to engage extensively in multiple simultaneous alliances.
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In the cross-border alliance literature, scholars have argued as an indication of failure owing to irresolvable problems arising from cultural differences (Barkema and Vermeulen 1997; Park and Ungson 1997). To address these gaps, the existing literature takes into account the social or cultural integration, an important issue in the realm of interorganizational attachment research (see Levinthal and Fichman 1988; Luo 2001; Seabright et al. 1992; Uzzi 1997; Zaheer et al. 1998).
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Assuming that conflict plays a creative role in organizational learning, the basic problem is not conflict resolution, but conversely conflict creation among team members (divergence), in order to successfully overcome it only subsequently (convergence). A similar process was analyzed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), on a wider scale: the two scholars examined a multinational joint venture created between the US Caterpillar Inc. and the Japanese Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. At first, the alliance between these two companies was characterized by misunderstanding and conflict regarding divergent ways of developing products. Many issues created contrast between the USA and Japanese engineers, regarding, for instance, who had the leadership of a project, how a process had to be developed or what value had to be assigned to performance criteria (cost, quality, performance, and safety), just to mention a few. Evidently, the divergences in the two cultures and the different paths every group followed to solve a problem made it very tough to communicate over these issues. Nevertheless, rather than avoiding to take any notice or attempting to settle the conflict, the two partners highlighted each other’s differences by using a series of mechanisms, such as interplant meetings and the pairing of engineers. The positive consequence was that, on the one hand, the Japanese engineers made their tacit knowledge more explicit to their US colleagues (externalization) and, on the other hand, the US engineers developed tacit knowledge regarding Japanese methods by mixing with their partners (socialization). This process was long and difficult, it caused uneasiness and led to passionate discussions, but finally both Japanese and USA approaches to product development and knowledge creation were successfully synthesized.
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Moreover, cultural differences may lead to open contrast, when a peculiar way of speaking and behaving, that is considered normal by an actor, is regarded as disrespectful by another. For example, English people think it is rude to interrupt somebody while they are speaking and they politely wait before replying; in East Asian cultures it is a sign of deference to pause after someone has spoken before giving a response, in order to be respectful and think over what has been said; in Mediterranean cultures, instead, interrupting a speaker is not usually considered irreverent, on the contrary it is a way to show enthusiasm and interest. Thus, people from different nationalities may interpret the same behavior in opposite ways: raising one’s voice may be considered a sign of arrogance by one or a way to stress importance on a concept by another; touching a person may be regarded as a display of presumption, on the one hand, or as a sign of friendship, on the other; avoiding eye contact may seem an expression of mistrust in one culture, or a sign of deference in another (Child et al. 1997).
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Del Giudice, M., Carayannis, E.G., Peruta, M.R.D. (2012). Culture and Cooperative Strategies: Knowledge Management Perspectives. In: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Management. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management, vol 11. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2089-7_5
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