Content area
Full Text
The primary premise explored in this paper is that organizational culture has the potential for even greater impact in multicultural organizations than mono-cultural ones because an organization's culture can intensify both the benefits and the challenges of employee cultural diversity, and thus indirectly, affect organizational performance, organizational learning and competitive advantage. The assumptions underlying this contention and relationships among variables that contribute to the impact are explored in this paper, along with practical organizational implications.
Despite the attention paid to organizational culture in both academic and popular management literature during the past several decades, we still do not fully understand it. After considerable emphasis on the power of culture in the 1980s and early 1990s, research on organizational culture has waxed and waned during the past decade. Yet we keep coming back to the importance of organizational culture, perhaps because the concept has genuine intuitive appeal for managers and almost certainly because the pervasive assumption has been that organizational culture somehow has a strong effect on performance and effectiveness in organizations (Dennison, 1990; Dennison & Mishra, 1995; Earley & Mosakowski, 2000).
The contention explored in the pages to come is that organizational culture is even more critical in multicultural organizations because of its impact on the benefits and challenges of employee cultural diversity - and thus on organizational performance, organizational learning and potential competitive advantage. The potential for magnified effect is applicable in all multicultural organizations, whether operating across national borders or within a single country with a culturally diverse workforce. The assumptions underlying this contention and relationships among variables that contribute to the impact will be explored, along with practical organizational implications.
Two changing realities make exploration of organizational culture's effect on multicultural organizations timely. First, globalization efforts and demographic shifts mean that multicultural organizations are increasingly the norm. In today's global environment employees may be working directly - in person or virtually - with people from all over the world; or they may be working side by side with immigrants from halfway around the world, or with people from the same country but of a different ethnic, racial or cultural background. Secondly, as interactions of numerous trends create altered business contexts, many organizations are learning that doing what made them successful...