Conducting Research Across Cultures: Overcoming Drawbacks and Obstacles

This article discusses some of the methodological and practical difficulties that cross cultural researchers experience in their studies, from the issues concerning understanding and studying other people's culture and separating its influence from that of the workplace culture, to the culture-specific nature of some supposedly universal managerial concepts such as HRM (human resource management) and the choice of appropriate research tools and paradigms. Building on the author's similar commentary on the subject a few years ago, the article draws a rather optimistic picture for the future while pointing out some avoidable methodological inadequacies still observed in many published reports of international comparative studies. The article also cites examples of recent studies which have made an effort to avoid these.