Environmental Context: Information Technology and Globalization |  |
Chapter SummaryThis chapter examines the environmental context in terms of information technology and globalization. There have been some amazing breakthroughs in information technology in recent years. The personal computer, now even handheld through personal
digital assistants (PDAs), have made e-mail, and the use of the Internet, Intranet, and Extranet everyday business tools. Of particular importance to the environmental context for the study of organizational behavior is e-business, emerging knowledge management, and the new emphasis on human/intellectual capital. E-business is dominated by business-to-business (B2B) transactions now and even more so in the future. Knowledge
management (KM) is concerned with both tangible knowledge assets and intangible knowledge or intelligence possessed by employees and stakeholders. Not only is acquiring and storing data important, but the real key to effective KM is sharing and
leveraging information and knowledge. The same can be said of human/intellectual capital. No longer just dependent on financial capital or capital equipment, today’s organizations need human capital (employee experience, skills, and ideas/creativity) to be
used and leveraged for competitive advantage.
Besides information technology, the international context in which organizational behavior operates is also becoming an increasingly important environmental context.
Few would question that there is now globalization and that cultural differences must be recognized in the study and understanding of organizational behavior.
The discussion starts off by defining culture, which is the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior. Although it must be remembered that it is difficult to make generalizations because of individual differ-ences
and the many subcultures operating in societies and countries, there are several dimensions of culture that do pretty well describe societal orientations. These dimensions are identified in the chapter as follows: how people see themselves; people’s relationship
to their world; individualism versus collectivism; the time dimension; and public and private space. These dimensions lead to organizational behavior differences across cultures. There are many reasons for these differences. The chapter draws heavily
from the research of Hofstede, who found that people tend to differ on the basis of individualism/collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity. However, because of the criticism of this widely recognized categorical scheme and the fact that Hofstede’s data are now more than 20 years old, the more recent extensive work on cultural dimensions of countries by Fons Trompenaars is also presented. His dimensions include universalism/particularism, individualism/collectivism, neutral/affective, specific/diffuse, and achievement/ascription. These cultural dimensions are used to analyze the topics (especially motivation, communication, and leadership) across cultures in the rest of the book. |
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education