Inside the managerial mind: culture, cognition, and action

Richard M. Steers; Carlos J. Sanchez-Runde; Luciara Nardon

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511810510.005

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4 - Inside the managerial mind: culture, cognition, and action

Richard M. Steers ,

Carlos J. Sanchez-Runde and

Luciara Nardon

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Richard M. Steers: Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Carlos J. Sanchez-Runde: Affiliation:
IESE Business School, Barcelona
Luciara Nardon: Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa

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Summary

You get very different thinking if you sit in Shanghai or São Paulo or Dubai than if you sit in New York.

Michael Cannon-Brookes Vice President, Business Development – India and China, IBM Corporation

Much of management theory is based on the writings of 20th century Western scholars whose disciplinary orientations were heavily grounded in economics and classical sociology. Their writings depict people as being individualistic, utility maximizing, transaction-oriented. In point of fact, people are social and communal beings. Along with rationality, they are also guided by emotions. By acknowledging this, global management discourse can evolve more holistic and inclusive theories.

Mzamo P. Mangaliso President, National Research Foundation, South Africa

This chapter addresses a simple question: What do managers do – and why? As we shall see, while this question may be simple and straightforward, the answer is far more complex. On the surface, most managers look pretty much alike. Some are Asian, some are Anglo, some are Latino, and so forth. Some are men; some are women. Yet regardless of their outward appearance, we often assume – incorrectly, as Mzamo Mangaliso points out – that these people are basically the same on the inside when they manage. A manager is a manager is a manager. Indeed, we often believe that we can define the roles of managers in ways that transcend cultural differences.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Management across Cultures
Challenges and Strategies
, pp. 85 - 125

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810510.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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