Intercultural management

Measurement drives behavior. That is one of the most fundamental rules of performance management. Another way of saying this is "what gets measured, gets done." Setting goals and targets, and linking performance indicators to incentives is meant to motivate people. However, people's behaviors are culturally dependent. Looking someone in the eye is polite in my country (The Netherlands), yet very impolite in others. The Dutch are known for being very direct (others would call it blunt), which doesn't always work in the UK or USA. My wife Alexandra is German, and she needed to learn to explain "why" if she wants something done (or not done) in The Netherlands, where in Germany authority counts more. 

Yet, management culture seems to equate to USA culture in many cases. Methodologies such as balanced scorecard, and best practices for implementing them, may usually work in the USA, but may completely fail somewhere else. Global companies have cultures too, but national cultures seem to be stronger than company cultures.

We have to make performance management culturally dependent in order to drive the right behaviors of people. Fortunately, in the field of intercultural management there is a lot of research on this topic; for instance, by Trompenaars and Hofstede. These scholars, and others, have defined many dimensions on how to describe cultures. Here is one example of how to apply performance management in different cultures, making use of one interesting cultural dimension, called Rules Orientation. The spectrum has two extremes: universalism and particularism.

Universalist cultures play it by the book. There are clear rules to make sure there are no exceptions and everyone is treated the same. This counts for citizens, customers, but also employees. Contracts need to be kept, regardless of the circumstances. Particularist environments contrarily focus on specific situations at hand. They speak of people in terms of relationships, such as "friend," "special customer," and "loyal employee."  Rules or not, the relationship needs to be protected. Contracts can easily be changed if circumstances change. If we apply this to performance management, it creates two entirely different sets of best practices. In universalist environments everyone is measured te same way. Metrics are clearly defined, consistent and comparable. Feedback is very open, rankings are public information within the company. The number speak for themselves. There is a clear bonus schema based on under- or over-performance.

However, in particularist environments, this would lead to dysfunctional behaviors. People will find ways to discredit the system, they will find alternative versions of the truth. Metrics in particularist environments are personal, they describe a person's unique position in the company. Feedback is not public at all, it is personal too, and the metrics are used to trigger a qualitative discussion. Incentives are at the discretion of the managers. However, in a universalist culture, this way of working would be totally rejected. It would lead to cynicism, and accusations of favoritism and even nepotism. Surely no collaboration can be expected in such a situation.

Behaviors of people, when confronted with performance management, can be predicted. And positive behaviors can be triggered. All it needs is a little cultural sensitivity.

frank