Gillian Warner-Søderholm

Culture matters: Norwegian cultural identity within a Scandinavian context

Whether managers are concerned with financial issues, marketing, or human resource management (HRM), cultural values and practices do matter. The purpose of this article is to understand Norwegian managers’ cultural values within the cross-cultural landscape of her neighbors in the “Scandinavian cluster.” Clearly, subtle but disturbing differences may surface even when representatives from similar cultures work together. As a follow on from the GLOBE project, data based on the GLOBE instrument were collected on culture and communication values in Norway from 710 Norwegian middle managers for this present study. Although the Scandinavian cultures appear ostensibly similar, the results illustrate that research can reveal subtle but important cultural differences in nations that are similar yet dissimilar. All three Scandinavian societies appear intrinsically egalitarian; they appear to value low Power Distance, directness, and consensus in decision making and to promote Gender Egalitarianism. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in the degrees of commitment to these values by each individual Scandinavian partner. These differences need to be understood and appreciated to avoid misunderstandings.

Exploring Societal Cultural Values and Human Rights and Development

This study is an exploration of the relationships between societal cultural values and various observable societal practices. We drew on extant data sources and explored relationships between societal values and human development indexes of 52 cross-listed societies. Correlations were explored using secondary data from notable and valid sources. Data analysis includes Pearson correlation, stepwise regression analyses, and R2 analyses to explore possible operational models. Statistical analyses offer support for the development of two usable models to explain cultural value dimensions that act as independent variables. This exploratory study identifies relationships between societal values and civil liberties and corruption indexes. These findings add to the debate of which cultural values and traditions may support or hinder human rights and human capital development.

Explicit preferred leader behaviours across cultures: Instrument development and validation

The purpose of this paper is to develop a reliable and valid field survey research instrument to assess national cultural cognitive templates of preferred leader behaviour dimensions to facilitate education, development, and training of managerial leaders operating across diverse organisations.,The study consists of focus group evaluations of the validity and the translations to local languages of a survey instrument assessing leader behaviour preferences in business organisations.,The studies find that the survey instrument and its translations are valid and reliable for assessing preferred leader behaviour across national cultures. The length of the survey is problematic, and a new project is underway to produce a shorter version with equivalent reliability and validity.,As the research project is long term, at this point, a relatively long survey is available for research, with a shorter version planned for the future.,Practical implications include producing and validating a field survey research instrument that is reliable and valid across cultures and languages, and can be employed to improve the understanding, development, and education of managers and leaders of international business organisations.,Management and leadership processes are employed in all aspects of life, and can be better understood and improved through this research project.,The majority of cross-cultural research is leader-centric studies of implicit leader characteristics; this project expands the scope of studies further into follower-centric studies of observed leader behaviour.

Data on social media use related to age, gender and trust constructs of integrity, competence, concern, benevolence and identification

This article contains data collected from self-report surveys of respondents to measure 1) social media usage, 2) age, 3) gender and 4) trust, measured within five major trust constructs of a) Integrity, b) Competence, c) Concern, d) Benevolence and e) Identification. The data includes all instruments used, SPSS syntax, the raw survey data and descriptive statistics from the analyses. Raw data was entered into SPSS software and scrubbed using appropriate techniques in order to prepare the data for analysis. We believe that our dataset and instrument may give important insights related to computers in human behavior, and predicting trust antecedents in social media use such as age, gender, number of hour online and choice of content provider. We have also created a parsimonious five factor trust instrument developed from the extant literature for future research. Hence, this newly developed trust instrument can be used to measure trust not only in social media, but also in other areas such as healthcare, economics and investor relations, CSR, management and education. Moreover, the survey items developed to measure social media use are concise and may be applied to measure social media use in other contexts such as national cultural differences, marketing and tourism. For interpretation and discussion of the data and constructs, please see original article entitled “Who trusts social media” (Warner-Søderholm et al., 2018) [1].

Doing Business in Norway: An International Perspective

This is an open access journal available from the publisher Asian Research Consortium http://www.indianjournals.com/ijor.aspx?target=publisher&type=167