International Conflict Management
Executive Summary Our project will examine four different international styles of conflict management and resolution in business. The project will loosely be based upon Hofstede’s analysis of cultural dimensions, while background literature will help to support these assumptions of each cultural identity. To examine exactly if these theories are accurate, our group will interview managers from four distinct countries: Canada, the United States of America, Germany and Austria. The hypothesis of this paper is that conflict management styles will differ between cultures, but that certain countries may share similarities of management style. Canadian and American conflict resolution styles will share many characteristics, while the Austrian and German managers will deal with conflict in a different manner to that of the North American nations. Ultimately, it will examine differences between ‘European” and “North American” management style. Our interview consisted of sixteen questions, and provided us with much information. Although it is difficult to definitively make conclusions on our research (since only a few managers were interviewed,) the answers that we received did shed some light on our topic. As we thought, there were many differences between all four approaches of management styles, which all could have been attributed to cultural differences and backgrounds. However, there were some distinct similarities between all the countries. Each manager interviewed desired “win-win” situations when dealing with conflict and each believed that there were legitimate differences between management styles of different cultures. Finally, after close analysis, it becomes clear that subjects from our North American companies dealt with conflict in a similar style, while there was a definitive European trend between the German-speaking countries that differed from North American one. Introduction What is a Conflict? Conflicts appear everyday in a variety of forms: from...
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