United Kindom National Culture

United Kingdom national culture

1. Introduction

United Kingdom is a developed country with long tradition culture (CIA, 2013). Its diversity was rooted after World War II, when United Kingdom turned to be an ageing country, which the working force proportion was increased but total population was decreased (Kirton &Greene ,2010). As the result, many waves of immigration of Jewish, Poslish, India etc.., (Haste, 2006)was create a multi-culture for UK where a manager could meet a lot of employees from different backgrounds and knowledge. In order to deal with this multi-culture context, Global leadership has been identified as a crucial element for large multinational company. There are a lot of book talking about Global leadership from general advice (i.e, respect culture) or very specific (i.e, Do not shake left hand when meet a person in Arab country. This essay will using the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness) Culture Practices (As is) scores by House et al(2004); Javidan et al (2006) as the backbone evaluate national culture in United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in Anglo cluster through the 4 key dimensions: Performance Orientation, Assertiveness , Gender Egalitarianism and Human Orientation as well as making reference to Barclays, one of the oldest British biggest bank in UK, to illustrate the implication in real business context .

2. Definition of GLOBE framework

GLOBE project, which is stand for the 'Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness' research program (House et al., 2004), is a large-scale contemporary research programme which take the main research on the relationship between national culture, organisational culture and leadership in organisation (French, 2010). The data was collected from organizational middle managers in 950 work organizations, mainly from three targeted industries: food processing, financial services, and telecommunication services, at 62 countries on over the world (French, 2010);( Venaik & Brewer, 2010). In the GLOBE, there are 9 dimensions: Power Distance, Uncertainty avoidance, Collectivism 1 (or Societal Collectivism), Collectivism 2(or In-group Collectivism), Gender egalitarianism, Assertiveness, Future- orientation, Performance orientation, Humane orientation. Besides that, 62 cultures were empirically verified in ten cultural clusters (French, 2010) such as Latin America, Anglo, Latin Europe, Nordic Europe, Germanic Europe, Confucian Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, Southern Asia and Eastern Europe (House el al, 2006 :p71). As far as this paper cover, the British culture, which is belonged to Anglo cluster, and its 4 dimensions, Performance Orientation, In-Group Collectivism, Gender Egalitarianism and Uncertainty Avoidance, will be carefully evaluation in main body. Data, that will be used