| With economic globalization and China's entry into WTO, commercial contacts among various countries are bound to be increasingly substantial. As a result, communication among people who come from different cultural backgrounds will certainly become a universal issue that arouses concern among people in different countries. A great number of multinational corporations and international companies have been mushrooming in our country. The fast changing international economic environment brings domestic corporations great business chances and challenges. How to run such kind of corporations successfully? How to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds and who come to work with different work-related values effectively? Misunderstanding gives rise to conflict and dispute. Hence, enhancing cross-cultural sensitivity as well as improving cross-cultural communication and cooperation becomes crucially important. It's not only a topic for anthropologists, sociolinguistists, sociopsychologists to conduct cross-cultural research but also a duty of those who have been engaging in commercial activities or who are going to take career in multinational or international corporations, no matter what position they are in or will be in, supervisors or subordinates, managers or employees. In short, businesspeople should take pains in learning effective cross-cultural communication skills. Culture is a dynamic, multidimensional, complex, and all-pervasive phenomenon. Clearly, no shortage of definitions of this concept exists. Before embarking on the task of analyzing cultural differences, the first part of this thesis is designed to tackle the questions of what the word "culture" means and of what main components and characteristics culture consist of. And then comes a brief and critical study of culture theories.As history keeps moving forward, so does culture. Of course, the process of change is gradual and difficult, sometimes painstaking, even revolutionary. But we should also keep in mind that the part of culture at the base of the iceberg that is deeply rooted in a nation's tradition and ideology resists to any changes. It's this relative stability of the core aspect of culture that both unifies and makes each culture unique, and that makes it possible to discuss the varieties of culture. The eminent Dutch management researcher, Greet Hofstede, made investigations twice for IBM Corporation. He classified four major dimensions in work-related value by means of a statistic analysis of the data collected. Basing on Hofstede's theories and by comparing with those of other researchers, we can possibly identify some of the major dimensions along which cultures differ. The four major dimensions are: individualism-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and achievement-relationship. Cultural differences penetrate into all aspects of behavior in workplace. Different value orientations exert great impact on perception of leadership, ways of management, and process of decision-making as well as on communication. The second part of the thesis makes an exhaustive analysis of Hofstede proposed theory. In addition, a comparative study is conducted. Therefore, two more important dimensions called timeorientation and Confucian work dynamism are supplemented. To expound profoundly, this paper is an attempt to make an analysis of culture diversity from identifying the most important aspects of behavior in the workplace, such as, leadership, management, and decision-making. However, the variables discussed here have been merely highlighted, and not all of the relevant variables have been covered. In view of this, a more varied set of measures of the cultural dimensions and a bigger and more varied sample size may be employed in future research. More and more businesspeople become aware that multinational management has to encounter cultural diversity. It's increasingly important for them to learn how to run a modernized corporation under cultural backgrounds other than their own, and how to communi...
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