Investigation And Implications Of An American Company’s Internal Cultural Conflicts

With the trend of globalization and launching of China’s reform and opening up policy,numerous multinational companies have poured into China. These multinationals not onlypromoted the development of China through introducing foreign capitals but also lead toexchange and collision of different values. Thus, to explore the influence of culture onconflict management styles and tap their relationship is vital for the communication of theemployees from different cultures and also extremely important for the company’s furtherdevelopment. In order to achieve the research goals, the author adopted G.Hofstede’s fourdimensions of cultural value including power distance, masculinity and femininity,uncertainty avoidance, and individualism and collectivism as well as Thomas and Kilmann’smodel of five conflict management styles as theoretical basis, and transacted his researchagainst the background of an American multinational company in ACN, attempting to explorethe relationship between culture values and conflict management styles so as to make duecontribution to intercultural communication and English teaching.In view of the above research goals, the author listed three questions, namely:(1)Are there any differences for Chinese and American workers’ preferred management styles?(2)What are Chinese and American workers’ preferred management styles and why?(3)Whatconclusions can be made based on this research?In order to study the above research questions, the author did literature review onprevious studies about culture, management and culture values of China and America so as tolay foundation for the succeeding research. The next chapter is the theoretical basis in whichthe author introduced G.Hofstede’s four dimensions of cultural value as well as Thomas andKilmann’s model of five conflict management styles and put forward his own research modelbased on the theories. In the fourth chapter, the author analyzed the research questionsthrough questionnaire and in the final chapter he concluded the whole thesis, arriving at theconclusions such as Americans prefer the competing and accommodating styles whileChinese more like avoiding and compromising styles etc. In addition, the author alsoconcluded implications for English teaching and indicated limitations as well as offeredsuggestions for further study.