Culture In The Global Business Case Study

The Role of Culture in the Global Business

The role of culture encompasses many critical aspects of doing business on the global stage. Chua, Roth, & Lomoine (2015) address how culture effects creativity in their article “The Impact of Culture on Creativity: How Cultural Tightness and Cultural Distance Affect Global Innovation Crowdsourcing Work”. The authors theorize that the success of creativity, in the form of developing new ideas and accepting new ideas, is directly related to how strongly a culture holds on to their social norms and how acceptable they are to any behavior deemed as a deviation from these norms.

Chua, Roth, & Lomoine (2015) first bring up the issue of creative problem solving with the global business world. Businesses

This is becoming a successful technique, as it is drawing in ideas from specific cultures. The article refers to this as cross-border creativity. This is especially important. According to Chua, Roth, & Lomoine (2015), cultural tightness and low tolerance to deviant behavior, in a specific culture, can create cautious behavior toward developing or accepting new ideas or concepts among the people within that culture. This concept can be supported by what Walker (2015) describes as formal cultures. In formal cultures there is a belief that there is a proper way and an improper way of doing things. In this type of culture, new ideas or new ways of doing something may not be readily

190). Gelfand, Nishii, & Raver (2006) support this idea by saying, “Cultural tightness and cultural looseness is defined as the strength of social norms and the degree of sanctioning within societies” (p. 1226). The article discusses both sides of this issue. First, it is theorized that cultural tightness hinders accepting creativity from outside of their own culture. Secondly, cultural tightness may actually enhance creativity from within the culture. The authors are saying that within a tight culture, the population does not easily accept new ideas, products, and etc. that are being presented from people or companies from outside of that culture. However, they are also theorizing that cultural tightness may increase the new ideas from within a culture because the people in a tight culture are more prone to work together to solve a problem or to create new ideas from within their own