Shui Fabrics is a 50-50 joint venture between U.S textile manufacture and Chinese company launched by Rocky River, they produce dye and coat fabrics for sale both Chinese and international sportswear manufacture. Ray Betzell is an American manager and Chui Wai is the Chinese the manager of Shui Fabrics.
A performance oriented society is a society with a high performance orientation that places high emphasize on performance and rewards people for performance improvements and excellence. On contrary a low performance oriented society pays less emphasis to the performance and more importance to loyalty, belonging and background. Ray Betzell, the American general manager was on a call with the president of Rocky River, Paul Danvers. Based on their conversation, Paul Danvers was very disappointed on the 5 percent annual return on the investment, instead he had much higher expectation around 20 percent annual return on investment. Whereas, Chui Wai is pleased with the way the business is running and according to him Shui was generating the right amount of profit at 5 percent annual return on investment. This shows that the American boss, Paul Denver is more a high performance oriented person than Chui Wai.
The second dimension is assertiveness. A high value on assertiveness means a society encourages toughness, assertiveness and competitiveness. On the other hand low assertiveness means people value tenderness and concerns for others over being competitive. To add to this, the third dimension compares the individualism and collectivism. Individualism is a preference for a loosely knit social framework in which individual are expected to take care of themselves where as in a collectivism society has a preference for a tightly knit social framework in which individuals look after one another and organizations to protect their members interests. Moreover, Ray Betzell’s American boss conceded that Shui had to cut labor cost, suggesting to incorporate more sophisticated technologies and reducing the work force would lead to a more acceptable level of profit. Paul being fully aware that the Chinese labors are being paid a fraction of what the labors in America are paid. On the other hand, according to Chui Wai, the joint venture was also fulling his expectations, he felt a great sense of accomplishment by providing job opportunities for over 3000 people. This tells us Paul Denver is being both highly assertive and individualistic person. However, Chui Wai is a total opposite of him, especially having an Asian background who are always described as less assertive and part of the collective society.
Uncertainty avoidance is a value characterized by people’s intolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity and resulting support for beliefs that promise certainty and conformity. Chiu Wai relatively shows high uncertainty avoidance characteristics. He was satisfied with the fact of earning 5% annual return on investment as it guaranteed him to be on the safe side since it was not too little neither was it too high which simply reduces the risks of being targeted by the local authorities.
A clear distinction could be perceived from this scenario of how Asian culture differs from Western Culture. Despite that, in today’s environment it is always ideal for managers to go global yet keep the local culture and ethics in mind to keep moving forward in this highly competitive business environment.