Major topics in cross-cultural management research during the last five decades: A review and research agenda

Over the last decades, growing internationalization of the economy and related globalization of competition and business strategies have generated increasing interest in international management research, and in particular in comparing management practices across different cultures and nations (Werner, 2002; Tsui et al., 2007). Therefore, comparative research, and cross-cultural research in particular, have received considerable attention by management scholars. Early narrative reviews by, among others, Schollhammer (1969), Ajiferuke and Boddewyn (1970), Kraut (1975), and Negandhi (1975) reported on the theoretical and methodological orientations of comparative management studies, in a way that also laid the foundations for establishing comparative management as a separate field of research. Interestingly, a large part of these contributions pointed specifically to the role of culture for explaining similarities and differences in management across nations and countries. Cross-cultural research has developed rapidly over the 1990s and 2000s, as its underlying motive has shifted “from curiosity to achieving an enlightened understanding of how management and organizational phenomena relate to cultural and national characteristics” (Earley and Singh, 1995: 329), and awareness has grown that cross-cultural research can allow management scholars not only to more accurately respond to increasingly international business contexts, but also to offer significant contributions to the overall field of management studies by deepening our understanding of fundamental management theories. This has lead to an increasing number of cross-cultural studies, and to several attempts to map and take stock of this growing literature. Among these review studies, those by Schaffer and Riordan (2003), Gelfand et al (2007) and Tsui et al (2007) are especially noteworthy. Although these studies have extensively scrutinized cross-cultural research in the field of management, we still lack a thorough assessment of the evolution of this literature over the last about five decades. This is the primary purpose of a large research project, from which this paper is drawn, which employs four dimensions of analysis in order to both critically assess each individual decade and more broadly depict the evolution of cross-cultural research over the entire time period under investigation. The selected dimensions are: (1) major themes and issues; (2) explanations of similarities and differences in organizational behavior; (3) research approach (empirical vs. conceptual); and (4) research topics. The present paper reports the findings of our analysis on the research topics exclusively.