Tài liệu Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management 26 pptx

234 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management
Box 7.1 Geocentric HR practices at UBS and Unilever
Polska
UBS: UBS, now the sixth largest financial services group, operates on a
global basis. The organizational structure reflects this with country man-
agers representing the business and functional areas, such as HR. For
example, the Global Head of Resourcing, based in London, reports to
the Global Head of Talent Management, based in New York. UBS has
around 80 000 employees, with 6–7000 based in the UK. According to
interviews, globalization had been a major issue for the business for many
years. The drivers were based on a desire to integrate the company across
borders, efficiencies of scale and demands from clients for a ‘one-stop
shop’. The challenge for the HR teams was to use ‘global principles’ to
govern processes. As an example, the following principles are used as
part of a global governance framework for employee resourcing:
■ Vacancies are always advertised internally before commencing an
external search
■ HR manages relationship with head-hunters, not the line manager
■ Head-hunters are only used for jobs above a certain grade
One of our interviewees commented that ‘the more you look for areas of
commonality, the more you find them’. This approach means that when
employment policies are adapted or created, there is an immediate
engagement with country managers from design through to implemen-
tation. The challenges for the HR function within UBS are less on
developing a ‘global mindset’ and more on the role and capability of the
HR function and its relationship with the business as a strategic partner.
Unilever Polska: According to the National Personnel Director of
Unilever Polska, ‘Unilever Polska is very much a reflection of the
global thing, with certain different shading. The fact that it is called
MNEs as part of the USA’s ‘economic imperialism’ at various
points in recent history and in certain regional contexts with par-

ticularly good effect (though not in the case of AT&T in our open-
ing chapter and Wal-Mart in the previous chapter). So, like all
two-by-two forms of ‘boxology’, these categories are an oversim-
plification of the strategies employed by MNEs, which are often
more complicated in reality, reflecting an intricate web of influ-
ences (Tayeb, 2003).
Chapter 7 Corporate reputation and branding in global companies 235
“global” does not mean at all that what is available worldwide must
be applied in Poland. Not at all. Anything that is predominately best
practice … if you don’t find it relevant you don’t take it. It is as simple
as that. Now having said that, there are, of course, as in any other inter-
national company, certain guidelines, or framework, within which we
have to stay. Things like job evaluation, remuneration guidelines, man-
agement development guidelines. I think that would be it. Anything
else is up to the National Chairman, i.e. up to me to suggest to the
Board to approve or disapprove. If we are talking job evaluation, it’s a
kind of “lingua franca”. If you go to Malaysia and I say “job class 20”,
and I took somebody who is job class 20 with us, and in Malaysia they
tell you he’s job class 20, [the] experience, the skills, the expertise will
be more or less the same. That’s why I call it a lingua franca. If I say we
recruit people by a selection board, what we have in Poland is more or
less available in South Africa or Argentina. If I say there are certain
restrictions on remuneration that means there are certain guidelines
which we have to follow here as well as in Hungary, US and UK, pro-
viding this does not break local rules.’
The geocentric strategy closely resembles the transnational strategy
described by Bartlett et al. (2004). A transnational strategy rests on facilit-
ating learning among subsidiaries, developing high flexibility and local
responses to problems and building an interdependent and integrated
culture. Companies seeking to develop a transnational company are

advised to pay great attention to their corporate culture and organ-
izational identity as a means of achieving global integration, since it is
the company’s values, organizational culture and identity that are seen
as the common language or ‘corporate glue’. HR policy tends to be spe-
cific and influential with numerous guidelines, procedures and guiding
corporate values. It is argued that employees in foreign subsidiaries learn
and internalize the values, behaviours and norms of the global company.
The intent is to de-emphasize national cultures and identities and replace
them with the company’s culture and organizational identity.
Examples of geocentric HR procedures are global policies regarding
recruitment and promotion criteria; ‘single status’ policies, a uniform
stance towards unions; standardized procedures for performance
evaluation; global compensation policies; uniform monitoring of
human resource management through opinion surveys; a code of
corporate values guiding the indoctrination of newly hired recruits;
and policies on ethics and CSR.
Can corporate HR practices
be transferred across national
boundaries?
In Chapter 6, we introduced the idea of embedded systems,
based on the important institutional and cultural differences
among countries. MNEs are often thought to be a force for
convergence but these differences are still important and influ-
ence strategy, people management and HR practices. We have
already seen this in a number of cases throughout this book.
The extent to which HR practices, intended to reinforce cor-
porate identities, images and brands can be transferred is often
thought to be a reflection of the ‘institutional distance’ between
the parent company’s country of origin and the host company’s
country of origin (Martin and Beaumont, 2001). But what exactly

are embedded systems and the institutions on which they are
based? And how have they come to be formed? How, for example,
do the laws, customs and industrial relations history of a country
or region constrain brand-building?
National cultures
Sociologists often refer to institutions in their analysis of societies,
by which they typically mean the key ‘pillars’ of society such as the
family, religion, education, the mass media, business and finan-
cial institutions, labour movements, the state and its agencies,
and so on. These key institutions both shape and are shaped by
236 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management
The geocentric company uses an integrated framework of HR policies
and practices as a basis for adaptation to local regional or global circum-
stances. The strategy is a conscious attempt to mix local approaches with
global policies. For example, a set of universal competencies might be
identified as part of a global performance management scheme, using
particular rating scales to ensure consistent standards. However, the
actual practice of appraisal interviewing and how ratings are arrived at
may differ from country to country.
national cultural beliefs, assumptions and values (Tayeb, 2003).
You will see in Box 7.2 a well-known example of describing
differences in national cultures.
Chapter 7 Corporate reputation and branding in global companies 237
Box 7.2 National cultural values
Generally speaking, in the management literature at least, culture refers
to ‘systems of meanings – values, beliefs, expectations and goals – shared
by a particular group of people that distinguish them from members of
other groups’ (Gooderham and Nordhaug, 2003, p. 131; Schneider and
Barsoux, 2003). Ed Schein, one of the founding fathers of cultural stud-
ies in management, has defined culture as:

a set of basic assumptions – shared solutions to the universal problems
of external adaptation (how to survive) and internal integration (how to stay
together) – which have evolved over time and are handed down from one
culture to another. (Schein, 1985)
One of the best-known attempts to distinguish countries according
to the differences in national cultural dimensions is by Hofstede (2003).
He identified five such dimensions:
■ Power distance: High and low power distance refers to the extent
to which the less powerful members of organizations and institu-
tions, such as the family, accept and expect that power is distrib-
uted unequally. This bottom-up view suggests that a society’s level
of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.
France and Spain are often cited as examples. Power and inequal-
ity, according to Hofstede, are fundamental facts of any society, and
experience of living in different societies will lead anyone to the con-
clusion that all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal
than others.
■ Individualism: This dimension is defined in contrast to collectivism
and refers to the degree to which individuals are integrated into
groups. In individualist societies the ties between individuals are loose:
people are expected to look after themselves and their immediate
family. The USA is seen as a highly individualist society. In collectivist
societies, people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohe-
sive groups, more often than not in extended families, which provide
238 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management
protection and a level of identity in exchange for unquestioning
loyalty. Chinese societies are good examples. It should be noted that
Hofstede did not intend the notion of collectivism to have a political
meaning, such as occurred in the old USSR. It refers to the group, not
to an official state ideology.

■ Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity: Hofstede attracted much
criticism for his use of terms here, especially from writers concerned
with gender studies. However, he claims that he has been misunder-
stood or misinterpreted. His argument was that different societies
distribute roles between the genders in different ways. His studies
revealed that (a) women’s values differ less among societies than
men’s values; (b) men’s values from one country to another contain
a dimension from very assertive and competitive (and very different
from women’s values in a country), to modest and caring (and simi-
lar to women’s values in that country). The assertive pole he called
‘masculine’ and the modest, caring pole, ‘feminine’. The women in
feminine countries he described as having the same modest, caring
values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat
assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these
countries show a gap between men’s values and women’s values.
Sweden is often used as an example of a feminine society.
■ Uncertainty avoidance: This refers to a society’s tolerance for
uncertainty and ambiguity and how it deals with these issues.
According to Hofstede, it refers ultimately to a society’s search for
and belief in a universal Truth and indicates the extent to which a
country’s culture mentally programs its members to feel comfort-
able in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations refer to
new and perhaps surprising ones, which are different from those
usually experienced. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize
the possibility of such situations by imposing laws and rules, safety
and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious
level by a belief in absolute truth. Germany is often cited as an
example.
■ Long-term vs short-term orientation: This fifth dimension was
brought to public notice by one of Hofstede’s colleagues, Michael

Bond, in a study among students in 23 countries around the world,
using a questionnaire designed by Chinese scholars. Values associ-
ated with long-term orientation are thrift and perseverance; values
associated with short-term orientation are respect for tradition,
fulfilling social obligations and protecting one’s ‘face’. Both the
Hofstede’s work, like a number of writers who have adopted
a cultural differences approach, has a number of shortcomings,
which practitioners should be aware of when using such research:
■ He generalized about the culture of national popula-
tions on the basis of a small number of questionnaire
responses of one organization in particular countries.
Small sample research is prone to error. In addition,
attempting to describe national variables while under-
taking research at the level of the firm is always danger-
ous. The corporate culture of the firm is always likely to
influence respondents’ answers.
■ He did not acknowledge the variation in cultures within
countries, as noted earlier, which can often be greater
than the variation between countries, e.g. the former
Yugoslavia and USSR.
■ Questionnaires are not a good means of identifying
deep-rooted concepts like culture. Many academics
claim that survey methods tap the surface of culture,
which can be fully understood by more in-depth qual-
itative research, or by living in a culture.
Nevertheless, Hofstede’s research is still the standard work
against which all other studies of international management com-
pare themselves; and his ideas have been replicated and validated,
at least partially, in numerous studies
1

. Both of us have found it a
useful starting point to think about the practical implications of
operating in different national cultures. Like any framework, how-
ever, it has limitations that have to be addressed by other ideas,
through which the institutional approach comes into its own (as
Hofstede himself has come to realize in his more recent work).
Chapter 7 Corporate reputation and branding in global companies 239
positively and the negatively rated values of this dimension are
found in the teachings of Confucius, the influential Chinese
philosopher who lived around 2500 years ago. However, the dimen-
sion also applies to countries without a Confucian heritage.
1
A more recent and ambitious study of comparisons in global leadership
drawing on Hofstede’s work is the GLOBE project (Global Leadership
and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness). The website is certainly
worth consulting, see www.thunderbird.edu/wwwfiles/ms/globe/.
Institutions and business systems
It is possible to make an analytical distinction, at least, between
the more abstract notion of national culture, with its emphasis on
values, assumptions and beliefs, and the more concrete notion of
institutions, which refer to the particular organizational forms
and structures of behaviour that define a society (which influ-
ences cultures and are, in turn, influenced by them). In the busi-
ness literature, institutional analysis, along with some of the ideas
about national cultures, has been used to describe the variety of
national or regional models that provide alternative and often
competing modes of operating in the global economy (Whitley,
1999). As we have suggested, competition between national sys-
tems has led to much borrowing and diffusion of best practices,
but these cross-border developments have not resulted in the

wholesale convergence predicted by the proponents of globaliza-
tion. Yes, institutionalists accept that national systems are increas-
ingly interlinked and interdependent and that we are witnessing
greater mutual influence between such national systems, but they
also point out that the picture is of a more complex pattern
of simultaneous convergence and divergence in any system (Ferner,
2000). These writers have introduced the concept of national
(or regional) ‘business systems’ to describe complex patterns
of institutions and behaviour that have become an accepted way
of comparing and contrasting business and management issues
in countries and regions of the world. We can get a better idea of
what a business system might comprise by examining the follow-
ing definition.
240 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management
Key definition: A national business system
National Business Systems comprise the interlocking institutions that
shape the markets, nature of competition and general business activity
of a country (or region). These institutions include the industrial rela-
tions system; the systems of training and educating of employees and
managers; the typical structure of organizations, the typical relation-
ships among firms in the same industry, typical firms’ relationships
with their suppliers and customers, the nature of financial markets of a
As you can see, this definition refers to the cultural features of
society, such as assumptions about fairness and justice, norms,
moral principles and recipes for action, but it also highlights
the specific organizational forms, relationships and systems that
both reflect and give rise to these cultural features of a nation or
region’s business system. We believe that this wider conception
of business systems and how they develop provide additional
insights for practitioners that make the approach indispensable

for a deep understanding of how to manage in specific countries;
the kind of understanding that might have served Wal-Mart well
in Germany. There are at least four characteristics of a business
system approach that make it useful for practitioners wanting to
understand the potential for creating strong corporate brands:
■ The importance of a historical perspective
■ The systemic and enduring nature of business systems
■ The role of critical turning points in changing systems
■ The basis for comparing business systems.
The importance of a historical perspective
The first of these insights is the emphasis on the historical develop-
ment of business systems, an area which organizational behaviour
specialists interested in international comparisons and cul-
tures have either neglected or played down. To those of us who
have lived and worked in different countries, this neglect of
history may seem strange, since people in everyday situations are
often proud of their history when describing their countries’
distinguishing achievements. For example, ask Scots, Swedish or
Dutch people, all inhabitants of small countries with a tradition
of good education, what they have done for the modern world.
Chapter 7 Corporate reputation and branding in global companies 241
society; the conceptions of fairness and justice held by employers and
labour; the structure of the state and its policies for business; and a
society’s idiosyncratic customs and traditions as well as norms, moral
principles, rules, laws and recipes for action.
Based on Hollingsworth and Boyer, 1997, p. 2
They will often point out a long list of mainly historical inven-
tions, ideas and people they have ‘gifted’ to the ‘New World’.
Thus Scotland claims 26 US presidents as being of Scottish
descent, as well as the inventors of the telephone (Alexander

Graham Bell), the steam engine (James Watt), the television
(John Logie Baird), the science of economics (Adam Smith),
branches of philosophy (David Hume) and sociology (Adam
Ferguson), penicillin, interferon, Dolly the Sheep and many
other, well-known engineering and scientific applications
(Herman, 2001). Scottish firms also had an enormous influence
on the development of modern financial services companies
and in financing industrial development in places such as Hong
Kong, Canada and the USA. So, to stick with these countries for
the moment, it seems inconceivable that we could truly under-
stand how international firms with origins in Scotland (like RBS,
Standard Life or Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, three major
Scottish MNEs mentioned in this book), Sweden (ABB or
IKEA), or the Netherlands (Philips or ABN-AMRO) operate in
practice without a historical perspective on the relationships
between education, innovation and export of people for which
these countries were noted, especially to the New World.
To widen the discussion a little, we might ask the question: why
is it that two countries as geographically (and, in some respects,
as culturally) close as the UK and Germany have developed dis-
tinctively different forms of economic organization, industrial
relations and attitudes to management, particularly managing
people? For example, Wal-Mart was relatively successful in its
UK acquisition of ASDA, but much less successful in Germany.
Frustratingly for those managers who look only to the present
and the future, part of the answer requires insight into the tim-
ing of industrialization in these two countries, their relationship
to the development (or absence) of political parties that sup-
ported the working classes, the development of trades unions,
approaches to the development of managers and the legacy

of major events such as the two world wars during the 20th
century. As some researchers have pointed out, trade unionism
in the UK developed prior to mass industrialization in the
18th and 19th centuries to provide support for craft-based
workers and pre-dated, by many decades, the political party (the
Labour party) created to support mass working class interests.
242 Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management
Consequently, the structure of trade unionism in the UK has
been complex, with large numbers of unions pursuing different
aims and often competing with each other for members and
for pay. Historically, many of these unions have had a strong polit-
ical agenda because they were formed before the Labour party,
the result of which, according to some commentators, has only
served to increase the conflict between management and labour
for most of the 20th century in Britain. Strike activity, particularly
unofficial strike action by small groups of workers, became a
marked feature of industrial conflict after 1945, at least in the
minds of the popular press, and gave birth to the phenomenon
known as the ‘British disease’.
Overlaid on these political and labour factors was a traditional
approach to recruiting and developing business leaders and
managers in the UK (predominantly England) who were not
experts in the task they were managing (witness the previously
described attitudes to vocational education), but were more
noted for social skills and graces for which their education and
social class backgrounds partially equipped them. It is not sur-
prising that these ‘gifted amateurs’ defined their roles predom-
inantly in terms of people management and external networking
rather than as technically proficient experts, except in the field of
accounting information. What might be more surprising, given

the people-management bias of the traditional British manager,
is that so much industrial conflict resulted. This can be partly
explained by the historically marked differences in social class
values that permeated UK management and labour, and which
furthered the ‘arm’s-length’ relationship created by the relative
inability of British managers to relate to their workers in terms of
expertise or the task (Stewart et al., 1994).
By contrast, much of German industry and its labour move-
ment had to be reconstructed from scratch, following the demise
of Hitler and the Nazi party and the devastation caused by the
Second World War. The German trade unions were purposely
reorganized, with British help, along industrial lines, so that the
competition between unions for members and pay never devel-
oped to the same extent that it did in the UK. These factors, cou-
pled with the return to a supportive system of labour legislation
that had been developed by the social democratic political party
prior to the 1940s and the new capital formation associated with
Chapter 7 Corporate reputation and branding in global companies 243