Impacts Of Cultural Differences In A Business Environment For French Companies In China

This research assesses the impact of cultural differences in a Sino-Frenchbusiness environment. After analyzing the concept and method existing for culturaldifferences, a comparison between French and Chinese were conducted and someimportant factors were found.The basic and most important value known by everybody is that China is acollectivism country. This value has been demonstrated by many researchers from thepast, but we are now in a changing time and we can actually find research provingthat China is becoming an individualistic country. It is important to know when thiscultural value changed in order to understand which cultural value is present in thebusiness environment. In a business environment, there are people from20to60years old, so it is important to know if everybody is still with a collectivism culturalvalue, or if the change already touches this environment and if yes, in whichproportion. So, one research question of this paper is to determine if Chinese have astronger collectivism culture value than French in a business environment but thedifference with the young generation tend to disappear.While analyzing cultural differences in general, researchers generally analyzedifferences and what to do to remove these differences or to adapt our behavior. Butthe main point before trying to adapt to a situation is actually to know how peoplereact to these differences. It is necessary to understand the impact of these differencesand misunderstanding. It could be that two persons are different but encounter onlyminimal problems; what would be the benefit to make an adaptation effort in that caseof a minor problem. So, an evaluation on the importance of these differences betweenChinese and French and how it is impacting the business environment has to be done.It has been demonstrated that French cultural values lead to competition andchallenge whereas Chinese cultural values lead on group coercion and harmony. Thesecond research question of this paper is determining if these differences in a businessenvironment are creating a conflict, misunderstandings or not. Finally, it has been demonstrated that self-construal between men and womaneven from a same country are different, we also know from several researchers thatfeminine role and masculine role vary depending countries. More precisely for thispaper, it was found that Chinese have a masculine gender role cultural value whereasFrench not. This difference is directly impacting the way of thinking of people andhas an important impact in a business environment. For example, someone from amasculine gender role cultural value country will not react in the same way assomeone who don’t have this cultural value in front of a woman who is his superiorin the hierarchy. So the last research question is analyzing if the French acceptance ofworking with woman manager is higher than Chinese.These comparisons were done by conducting interviews with9people and aquestionnaire answered by166respondents. We could find that there is a realdifference between the two groups tested. That Chinese have a stronger collectivismvalue but that young generation tends to become individualistic. Moreover, thecultural values lead to avoid conflict but this fact is also changing for new generationbecause of the change of new generation. However, avoidance of conflict does notmean easier to manage due to over cultural pattern. Finally French have a betteracceptance of woman manager but the level of Chinese employees is also really highas the result show that China don’t have a masculine gender’s role cultural value. Soas a conclusion, it was found out that there is today two different groups of Chineseemployees, the young generation group who is under30years old and tend to behavelike French employees, and the older Chinese employees who still have traditionalcultural values, even if these values are not as strong as before. Moreover, theavoidance of conflict pattern which is helping French managers to adapt the newenvironment in early stage will then lead to misunderstanding because it will takelonger for managers to realize the differenced existing. Finally, woman managers arenot a problem anymore for china so no necessity for France to choose their managersregarding to the gender. So the last part of the research is presenting the recommendation to help French managers to better understand Chinese employeesand lead to a better success of French companies in China.