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Methods of competitive advantage to manage effectively in various countries with different cultures INTRODUCTION In today’s integrated and interdependent global economy, more and more firms do business in different countries. The increased complexity of international business environment and heightened international competition make it necessary for Multinational Corporations to utilize all possible methods of competitive advantage to manage effectively in various countries with different cultures. As the old adage says, “when in Rome do as the Romans do”, one of the focal issues in cross-cultural management is a good understanding of cultural differences across national borders. Geert Hofstede, an expert on cross-cultural differences and management, defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another…Culture, in this sense, includes systems of values; and values are among the building blocks of future.” (Hofstede, 1984) In the late 1960s, the famous study of how culture relates to values in the workplace was undertaken by Hofstede. He collected data on employee attitudes and values from 116,000 IBM employees. This data enabled him to compare dimensions of culture across forty countries. From the results of this survey, Hofstede identified four “value” dimensions that he claimed summarized different cultures: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity. (Schneider and Barsoux, 1997) Later, Hofstede expanded his original research by adding the fifth dimension which is called long-term versus short-term orientation, based on a study of the values of students coming from twenty-three countries. (Hofstede, 1993) This paper is divided into three parts. The first part gives an overview of the Hofstede’s model, including some analyses of it and the limitations of it. The next two parts of the paper analyse three dimensions of the model due to the limitation of words. The second part examines the dimensions of Power Distance and Individualism versus Collectivism, by means of a case study of the Lincoln Electric Company. The third part is based on the other case study of the Coca-Cola Company, to examine the usefulness of another dimension – Uncertainty Avoidance. PART ONE: AN OVERVIEW OF HOFSTEDE’S MODEL 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。