Description
The world of organizations is no longer defined by national boundaries. International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior breaks down the conceptual, theoretical, and practical boundaries that limit our ability to understand and work with people in countries and cultures around the world. Prior to the 21" century, a disproportionate amount of the published material on management came from the United States. American managers and American-trained researchers observed the behavior of people in U.S.-based organizations. From their observations and research, they developed models and theories to explain the behavior of people and organizations. The problem was in their implicit assumption: most scholars assumed that what was true for Americans working in the United States was also true for people from other countries working worldwide. Both managers and researchers assumed that Americans' work behavior was universal. They were wrong. International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior challenges us to transcend our parochialism matter which country we grew up in-and to see the world from a global perspective.
Today, managers no longer have the luxury of reducing global complexity to the simplicity of assumed universality; they no longer have the luxury of assuming that there is only one best way to manage. Luckily, we have learned that global complexity is neither unpredictable nor random. Variations across cultures and their impact on organizations follow systematic, predictable patterns. Starting with a core of traditional, primarily U.S.-based understandings of the behavior of people in organizations, International Dimensions becomes a guide for modifying our attitudes, thinking patterns, and behavior. Far from ignoring the historical body of managerial knowledge, International Dimensions expands our understanding of people's behavior at work to include the diversity and complexity of today's global environment.
ISBN:9780324360752
