Dr. Strzelczak Stanislaw

Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

The importance of multicultural competence in business activities has become widely accepted in recent years. The leading business schools attempt to enhance their multicultural outlook by a range of initiatives. This trend is supported by some international ventures (e.g. by the EU programs resulting from the Declaration of Bologna). Similar topics were added to the portfolio of many consulting companies. However, a majority of attempts toward multicultural business education apply rather limited understanding of the multicultural competence. First, they focus mostly on national cultures. Secondly, they apply very simplified patterns of analysis of the cultures, typically reduced to several factors, mostly of behavioral nature. This paper provides a wider and deeper understanding of multicultural business competence. In the beginning, common existing practices of graduate business schools, consulting companies, and corporate Human Resources Development (HRD) activities are reviewed. Later, possible different meanings and perspectives of organizational and business cultures are considered, especially with reference to the Asian and Western cultures. Finally, the issues of leveraging cultures and hard organizational systems to support improved business performance and competitiveness are discussed. The author stresses a need to develop relevant models and tools that could enable satisfactory analysis of business cultures, including their interactions and trade offs with hard organizational systems, as well as accompanying assessment metrics and methodologies.