To What Extent Does an American Firm's Culture Impose Itself upon Its Managers

Executive Summary

The purpose of this term paper was to analyze the relationship between the American business values expressed by the American financial institution, BNY Mellon and the managers from both Scandinavia and Britain, to see to what extent their values had differed as a result of working in a culture different to that of their own. Secondary research for this report consisted of defining the cultural models for each culture, gathering background information on the organization and also analyzing Hofstede's indicators. As part of the primary research we submitted a questionnaire to the managers at BNY Mellon in order to compare the results with the ones observed by Hofstede.

The major findings indicate that we cannot verify an overlap of American cultural values, and while some key aspects of the different cultures tend to clash, they seem to co-exist within the organization.

Furthermore, we discovered that the only major departures from Hofstede's values and each countries cultural profiles were observed around autonomy and salary. We conclude that the gaps found on these two specific indicators are due to a combination of cultural influence from the organization, industry, and human nature.

Introduction

With this project we intend to analyze the impact of the cultural principles of the American banking institution BNY Mellon on its different managers cultural values. Both the managers profiles will be defined using both an analysis of Geert Hostedes cultural indicators as well as literary theory from numerous academics in this field. These profiles will then be analyzed against our results from our primary research to discuss whether there is evidence to suggest that these cultural values have been influenced as a result of being exposed to the American work culture of BNY Mellon. BNY Mellon was formed as result of the merger between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation.

Historically both firms were conceived in America in the early 1900's. The organization is a key player in the global financial markets with operations on a worldwide scale supported by 43000 employees of numerous cultural and national backgrounds. The bank operates in six distinct areas: asset management, asset servicing, wealth management, broker-dealer and advisory services, issuance services, and treasury services.

Cultural Differences

Bjerke (1988) argues that culture is learnt at a young age and is reinforced through social pressure and learning within a context, for example, a nation or group of countries. These intersubjective mental programmes we share with others from the same culture are complemented by subjective values that give us our unique individual personalities. This in turn determines how we behave and give us an anchoring point in our lives, an identity, a social place and view of the world. The need for humans to create order and consistency in our lives has given rise to the creation of cultural paradigms that give structure to our experiences and meaning to all of our thoughts and actions.

As our national cultures vary around the world it can be argued using Bjerke's above definition that an organization created within a culture will adopt its values and behavior much like we do as individuals. All of these organizational cultures are influenced by the national culture in which they operate and at the same time all contribute to the overall business culture of the nation. This mutual process creates organizational cultures with values that very much mirror those of the national culture, which in turn determines how the organization behaves and operates. Based on this theoretical argument we will take that BNY Mellon does in fact have a culture similar to that of the American culture and hence allow us to compare these against the other two cultures. As much as organizational cultures are influenced by the national culture in which they operate, employee performance may also be influenced by those work related values that make up the culture of the organization, even if they vary from those that they learnt from their national culture as a youth.

Hofstedes Indices: American, British and Scandinavian Culture Scores

Hofstede's work on cultural differences follows a similar argument to that presented by Bjerke. Through the process of socialization, values are learned that contain a component of the national culture in which they are inserted.

In order to compare and analyze our findings against a theoretical perspective we will use Hofstede's Cultural dimension Indices, which were developed to explain the differences in national work related value patterns in terms of four basic dimensions:-

Power Distance (PDI) aims to explain the degree of the centralization of authority within the organization as well as the degree of autocratic leadership as endorsed by the employees. It suggests that a cultures' level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.

Individualism (IDV) on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism. This stresses the importance of work goals to the individual in which they are an active agent such as personal time, autonomy and personal challenges rather than those in which they are dependent on the organization.

Masculinity (MAS) versus its opposite, femininity refers to the importance placed on the values prescribed to each gender. Masculinity encompasses the relative importance of job goals such as earnings, recognition, advancement and challenge against the relative unimportance of feminine job goals such as employment security, helping others and fostering cooperative relations at work.

Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) deals with a culture's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity based on indicators of employment stability such as work stress levels and rule orientation. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, and different from usual.

Hofstedes Scores for America, Britain and Scandinavia

Hofstede Scores PDI IDV MAS UAI

United States 40 91 62 46

Scandinavia 31 71 5 29

United Kingdom 35 89 66 35

The American Culture

With one of the most powerful economies in the