Abstract
Building on social psychology and international business literature, this chapter aims at raising managers’ awareness on the opportunity to capitalize on cultural differences in cross-cultural business contexts. This work is based on survey data and interviews to European managers investing in China through FDI in the environmental industry. First, this work investigates managers’ perceptions of culture within the multidimensional concept of psychic distance, which is a 12 dimension-based construct. Second, it explores what culture stands for our managers following our findings, which show the relevance of the cultural dimension over the others. Third, we propose and illustrate the sociocognitive value of an intercultural laboratory as a potential “structured business practice” addressed to those early-stage managers who are about to approach the firms’ host country. The failing ethnocentric view is a common perspective adopted by managers in cross-cultural business settings. Therefore, the idea behind this chapter is to help international managers overcome this view and leverage on an inter-individual and collective construction of knowledge, stimulated by the intercultural laboratory activities based on group work. The focus is on “opportunities”—rather than “distances”—generated by cultural diversities. Next to this, enhancing the “dialogue” between different cultures as well as different research areas is a key approach in cross-cultural business settings, not only for managers having different cultural backgrounds but also for scholars belonging to different discipline areas of research.
Authors are thankful to prof. Barbara Pojaghi and prof. Song Yang for their contribution to this chapter.
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Vaccarini, K., Spigarelli, F., Tavoletti, E., Lattemann, C. (2017). A Social Psychological Perspective on the Perceptions of Cultural Differences. In: Cultural Distance in International Ventures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62193-7_3
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