Empirical analysis of ‘level of comfort’ among international workers at multinational firms

Abstract

The research is grounded in responses of multicultural team members at multinational workplaces from 14 different countries that provided their preferences or choice of nationalities of members that they would like to hire/work with. Results show clear differences in ‘levels of comfort’ displayed by managers and members having particular national cultural background in what concerns their preferences and choices of colleagues with origins from other national cultures. These variations results into designation of rankings to the destination regions based on preference by the respondents from the source countries. Results also show a somewhat common pattern of preferences irrespective of their national origins that has been described.

Keywords

• cultural distance
• cross culture study
• comfort with foreign cultures
• culture to culture comfort