How Corporate Cultures Differ Around the World

What you told us about your workplaces.

by

J. Yo-Jud Cheng

and

Boris Groysberg

by

J. Yo-Jud Cheng

and

Boris Groysberg

January 08, 2020

Summary.

Culture can be a powerful lever for maintaining, renewing, and shaping an organization’s viability. While global teams can provide cost savings and help firms access talent from around the world, cultural differences and divergent expectations around workplace norms can be sources of friction. That’s why it’s so important to understand how cultures tend to differ around the world.

Building upon the integrated culture framework we presented in “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture” (written with our collaborators Jeremiah Lee and Jesse Price), we launched an online assessment to allow HBR readers to explore their own organizations’ cultural profiles. We received over 12,800 responses from across the globe between December 2017 and May 2019 (you can explore your organization’s cultural profile here).

JC

J. Yo-Jud Cheng is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy, Ethics and Entrepreneurship area at Darden.
BG

Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate at the school’s Race, Gender & Equity Initiative. He is the coauthor, with Colleen Ammerman, of Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
bgroysberg

How Corporate Cultures Differ Around the World

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