Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts

Cross-Cultural Management: Essential Concepts, Fourth Edition introduces readers to the fundamentals of cross-cultural management by exploring the influence of culture on interpersonal interactions in organizational settings and examining the ever-increasing number of cross-cultural management challenges that global managers face in today’s workplace. Instead of taking a country specific approach, authors David C. Thomas and Mark F. Peterson offer a predominantly psychological perspective—focusing on the interactions of people from different cultures in organizational settings. This approach shows readers the effects culture has on a wide variety of cross-cultural interactions across organizational contexts.

David C. Thomas (PhD, University of South Carolina) is currently the Beedie Professor of International Management at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of ten books, including most recently The Multicultural Mind: Unleashing the Hidden Force for Innovation in Your Organization (Berrett-Kohler Publishers). He has also authored Essentials of International Human Resource Management: Managing People Globally from SAGE Publications (with Mila B. Lazarova) and the best selling Cultural Intelligence: People Skills for Global Business, published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers (with Kerr Inkson). With Peter B. Smith and Mark F. Peterson he published the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management Research from SAGE Publications. His research on cross-cultural interactions in organizational settings has appeared in numerous journals. He is a past Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Advances in Global Leadership and European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management.

His previous academic postings have included positions at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he was also Director of the Master of International Business Program, and The Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) Sydney, Australia. He has held visiting positions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Hawaii, Massey University, New Zealand, ESCEM, Tours, France, and Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. In addition to teaching at both the undergraduate and the postgraduate level, Dr. Thomas has developed executive education programs in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States and has served as a consultant to numerous multinational firms and government agencies. When not writing or teaching he can most likely be found scraping or varnishing or sometimes sailing his 1984 Hans Christian cutter, “Clovelly”.

Mark F. Peterson (PhD, University of Michigan) holds the Hofstede Chair in Cultural Diversity at Maastricht University. He has published over 120 articles and chapters, and several books. The articles have appeared in major management and international management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, Human Relations, Management International Review, Organization Studies, and Organization Science. He has also contributed international management themes to the basic social science literature through chapters in the Annual Review of Psychology, the Communication Yearbook, the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior and an Area Editor for the Journal of International Business Studies.