A Comparative Study Of Corporations' Core-values In China And America: An Intercultural Perspective

Along with the development of market economy and globalization, the corporations as the social economic entities, have become more and more important to promote a nation's economic development. According to the previous research results in the field of management, corporate culture is proved to play a crucial role in determining a corporation to be successful or not. However, the reality is that many companies spend much time on specific business and make no effort to care about building their companies'corporate cultures.Firstly, this paper reviews the causes of the development of corporate culture and puts forward that it is necessary to study Chinese and American corporations'core values in the background of global economic crisis in 2008. Then, based on the definitions of culture, corporate culture and corporate core values, the author makes a summary of relevant researches and comments on the previous comparative researches concerning the corporate cultures between China and Japan, China and America and the social culture of the latter two, which offers a theoretical research background to the comparative study of Chinese and American corporate core-values. The third part offers a survey of 25 Chinese corporations and 25 American ones, and their corporate core values (CCVs). Six stories concerning these businesses and their CCVs are offered to illustrate how CCVs promote the development of businesses. The fourth part collects data by categorizing some key words in the CCVs of the chosen corporations, calculate the percentage of each and list the top six essential elements of CCVs in those businesses---Integrity, innovation, people-orientation, customer-orientation, team spirit and social responsibility, which are the similarities in CCVs shared by Chinese enterprises and American ones. The cultural dialectical analysis is adopted in this part and the differences in connotations of integrity, thoughts of innovation, interpretations of people-orientation, traditional notes for customer-orientation, orientations of team spirit and measurements of corporate social responsibility are analyzed in the background of social culture of China and America. The underlying causes of these differences are explored in the aspects of philosophical thoughts, religious beliefs and orientation of interpersonal relationship. In the fifth part of this paper, discussions are made concerning the practical significance of the research on the core values of corporations in dealing with the cultural conflicts and culture integration possibly occurring in the intercultural management and negotiation. It is pointed out that attaching importance to CCVs will effectively promote the cultural construction of corporations in our country and promote our country's economical development. The sixth part is the conclusion, which briefly summarizes the outcome of this paper and limitations.