A Website-based Study On Chinese-American Corporate Value Differences-Content Analysis Approach

Corporate value plays a crucial role in building healthy corporate culture. Thestudy of corporate value differences can help corporations minimize unnecessarylosses caused by value differences in cross-cultural negotiation and cooperation. Mostprevious studies on corporate culture are qualitative ones from corporate managementperspective. What’s more, as corporate values are deeply rooted in corporate cultureand difficult to be observed visually, few studies were conducted on this specialcomponent. With the purposes of supplementing to the previous studies on this topicand providing suggestions for companies in the global competition, this cross-culturalstudy adopts the content analysis method to compare the corporate values of15Chinese and15American companies embraced on their official websites. Hofstede’sfive value dimensions are referred to as the theoretical framework on which thefollowing five hypotheses are based:(1) The Chinese corporate values embody morecollectivistic characteristics while the American corporate values embody moreindividualistic characteristics.(2) The American corporate values have moreexpressions indicating masculinity than the Chinese corporate values.(3) The Chinesecorporate values are more likely to avoid uncertainty than the American corporatevalues.(4) The Chinese corporate values are more long-term oriented while theAmerican corporate values are more present-oriented.(5) The Chinese corporatevalues embody larger power distance than the American corporate values. The resultsshow that hypothesis1and hypothesis4are supported while hypothesis2, hypothesis3and hypothesis5are not. Besides the above facts, the author also discovers that theAmerican corporate values place greater emphasis on the global values and thereforehave more global strategies. And due to the impact of globalization, some traditionalChinese values are undergoing subtle changes in the business setting.