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Preferred Conflict Management Styles in the Modern Trade Industry in Thailand
Mr. Thomas E. Fernandez-Freercks
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Business Administration Department of International Business
Graduate School The University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce
2004 ISBN 974-677-471-9
© Copyright by The University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce
Thesis Title Preferred Conflict Management Styles in the Modern Trade
Industry in Thailand
Name Mr. Thomas E. Fernandez-Freercks, Graduate School, The
University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce
Degree Master in Business Administration
Major Field International Business
Thesis Advisor Dr. Randall Shannon, School of Business, The University of
the Thai Chamber of Commerce
Thesis Co-Advisor Dr. Prasert Sirisereewan, School of Business, The University of
the Thai Chamber of Commerce
Graduation Year 2004
ABSTRACT This research study explores the relationship between the home country of a
company and the preferred conflict management styles. Hofstede's cultural
dimensions (Power Distance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity and
Uncertainty Avoidance) are brought in context with Rahim's conflict management
styles (Integrating, Dominating, Obliging, Avoiding and Compromising), thus the
influence of the home country's culture on large foreign multinational companies in
Bangkok was tested by comparing their preferred conflict management styles with
those preferred in Thai companies of comparable size in the same industry, Modern
Trade Retailing. The methodology used was Survey Research and the sampling
method was Convenience Sampling, conducted in four Thai and three European
companies.
The result of this research is that no difference could be found between a
group of European companies and a group of Thai companies. The companies were
also divided into five organisational levels (Top Management, Middle Management,
Lower Management, Clerical Staff and Non-clerical Staff) and it was found that the
preferred conflict management style is independent of the organisational level.
However, a relationship between the education of the respondents and the preferred
conflict management style could be shown. The results of this research study are
useful for companies and can be applied by the persons concerned with managing
conflicts in the companies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................... iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................... v
LIST OF TABLES..................................................................................................... vi
LIST OF FIGURES................................................................................................... vii
Chapter
1. Introduction..................................................................................................... 1
Rationale.................................................................................................... 1
Objectives of the Research Project............................................................ 2
Contribution and Benefit of the Research................................................. 4
Operational Definition............................................................................... 4
2. Literature Review............................................................................................5
Historical Background............................................................................... 5
Culture....................................................................................................... 6
TABLE OF CONTENTS (CONTINUED)
1. National Culture............................................................................. 12
2. Organisational Culture................................................................... 18
Conflict...................................................................................................... 23
1. What is a conflict? ......................................................................... 23
2. Types of conflict............................................................................. 24
3. Managing conflict.......................................................................... 25
Tactics and Strategies................................................................................ 31
Summary................................................................................................... 33
3. Research Methodology................................................................................... 35
Conceptual Framework............................................................................. 35
Research Design, Population and Sample................................................. 36
Research Hypotheses................................................................................. 40
Data Collection Method............................................................................ 43
The Questionnaire..................................................................................... 43
Validity and Reliability: The Pilot Tests................................................... 46
Factor Analysis.......................................................................................... 46
Reliability of the Final Questionnaire....................................................... 48
4. Data Analysis.................................................................................................. 50
Hypothesis Testing.................................................................................... 50
TABLE OF CONTENTS (CONTINUED)
5. Discussion and Conclusion............................................................................. 60
The Result..................................................................................................60
Comparison of Theories and Findings...................................................... 61
Implications for Businesses....................................................................... 63
Limitation / Scope of the Research........................................................... 63
Future Research......................................................................................... 64
BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................... 67
APPENDICES........................................................................................................... 77
A. The Modern Trade Industry...................................................................... 78
B. Information about Thailand....................................................................... 80
C. The Questionnaire..................................................................................... 82
D. The Demographic Data Survey Instrument.............................................. 85
BIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 88
LIST OF TABLES Table
1. Examples of Cultural Dimensions................................................................. 13
2. Sample and population................................................................................... 37
3. Conflict management styles in the questionnaire.......................................... 45
4. Factor analysis............................................................................................... 47
5. Reliability....................................................................................................... 48
6. Preferred conflict management styles in Thai companies............................. 50
7. Preferred conflict management styles in European multinationals................ 51
8. ANOVA between groups, Thai vs. MNC...................................................... 52
9. ANOVA of conflict management styles by organisational level in Thai companies............................................................................................. 53
10. F-statistic and significance for CM styles by organisational level in
Thai companies.............................................................................................. 53
11. ANOVA of conflict management styles by organisational level in Thai branches of multinational companies............................................... 54
12. F-statistic and significance for CM styles by organisational level
in Thai branches of multinational companies................................................ 54
13. Education of the total sample in percent........................................................ 55
LIST OF FIGURES Figure
1. Cultural differences: National, occupational, and organisational level......... 10
2. Manifestation of Culture: From the Shallow to the Deep.............................. 20
3. Conflict situation versus conflict................................................................... 24
4. The styles of handling interpersonal conflict................................................. 27
5. The basic dimensions of conflict management styles.................................... 28
6. Conceptual Framework.................................................................................. 36
7. Distribution of education across the sample.................................................. 56
8. IC by education.............................................................................................. 57
9. AO by education............................................................................................ 58
10. D by education............................................................................................... 59
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the help and support from
many people. First and foremost, I need to mention my thesis advisor, Dr. Randall
Shannon, who always patiently and immediately answered my questions, even though
he was in the last and stressful phases of his own Ph.D. dissertation. Thanks go also to
my co-advisor, Dr. Prasert Siriseriwan, who took time off to advise me despite his
busy schedule. I would like to thank Dr. Afzal Rahim for his patient support by email,
and Dr. Barend J. Terwiel, Director of the Department of Thai and Vietnam Studies at
the University of Hamburg (my home town in Germany), for his great insight into the
Thai culture, and for taking the time to explain some complex concepts to me. I
cannot possibly forget to mention Dr. Chris Christodoulou of Swinburne University of
Technology, Melbourne/Australia, who first taught me about Organisational
Behaviour and was kind enough to give very valuable advice about practicality and
methodology.
Further important thanks go to Mr Somsakul Trepunyakul, Ms Kochapan
Mingsakul and Mr Wiboon Wongwansrisuk, my translation team, for the time and
effort they spent for both the translation process as well as additional research
assistance. Thanks go also to Ms Nutthaporn Charoenporn for research assistance and
Mr Wichard Graf von Harrach for proof-reading and editing.
Chapter 1
Introduction
This chapter will explain the rationale behind this research, describe the
objectives and explain the contribution to the academic world and the Thai society.
Rationale
Ever since mankind has lived in groups, conflicts occurred, be it for control
(Ross, 1984) or for power (Cowher 1996), or simply to make a society work in a
harmonious way. Different societies have developed different values over the
millennia; different cultures were born. Conflict is managed differently across
cultures, and much research has been done in the past decades to understand and
distinguish these conflict management styles.
There have also been many attempts to measure the cultures, and different
dimensions were found to describe them. There are national cultures but there are also
organisational cultures. Organisational cultures are made up of many aspects, one of
them being the way conflict is managed within the organisation. This, too, can be
measured. The open question is the influence of the national culture on the
organisational culture: current research is contradicting as to whether the national
culture of the country the company is located in has a bigger influence than the home
2
country of a local branch of a multinational company, especially when headed by a
national of that home country.
Therefore, this paper will explore the home-country-effect versus the host-
country-effect on conflict management. It measures the difference in conflict
management styles preferred by managers and staff of Thai companies in comparison
to the preferred styles in local branches of Western multinational companies by using
a questionnaire. The questionnaire is based on the well-established Conflict
Management theories of Dr. Afzal Rahim.
Much research has been done on Conflict Management styles in different
countries. However, the subjects of most of this research were managers of local
branches of multinational corporations or of international companies, or students.
The research on Thai national culture is based on research conducted in foreign
companies; the existing research on Conflict Management styles in Thailand was
conducted in English and may therefore not necessarily be representative for the Thai
people. However, as Michael (1997) put it, "attempts to transfer Western management
theories without considering the hosts' cultural value system is a prescription for
failure."
Objectives of the Research Project
The objective of this research project is to investigate whether the Conflict
Management styles applied in Thailand in fully Thai-owned companies differ from
those in Thai branches of multinational corporations. This research attempts to
explore what differences there are between Thai companies and local branches of
3
multinational companies--in the field of Conflict Management--and whether the
behaviour in the Thai companies is different from the one suggested by the current
theories. Hofstede's (1980) research on national culture was conducted at the many
branches of IBM, as IBM has a corporate culture that spans the globe. The question
is: Is conflict managed differently in Thai companies?
In Thai branches of multinational corporations (MNCs), to what extent are the
preferred conflict management styles different from those preferred in Thai
companies, and does this difference depend on the organisational level (top
management, middle management, lower management, non-management staff) of the
staff?
Another objective will be to measure whether the conflict management styles
used by Thai people in Thai companies depend on their education, and whether they
have been educated in Thai programs, international programs in Thailand, or abroad.
Studies have found that Conflict Management styles depend on the national
culture (Morris, 1998; Tjosvold and Sun, 2002) - but which national culture is meant?
Is it the national culture of the country in which the branch is located, or the national
culture of the manager and the company's home country?
This research attempts to answer these questions.
4
Contribution and Benefit of this Research
The issue of preferred conflict management styles is of some importance for
Thai companies and for the expanding body of academic literature in the field of
cultural research. If this research suggests that there are differences in managing
conflict between large (and presumably successful) Thai companies and their
multinational counterparts, the applicability of some management theories may be
questionable in Thailand. There are theories about how conflict should be managed in
a large and structured company, but these theories, created in the Western world, may
not be the right pattern to follow for Thai companies. In fact, this research encourages
further research into different organisational behaviour patterns in Thai companies
and how they influence effectiveness in such companies. It may lead to new
management theories, valid for Thai companies and different from the Western
theories; on the other hand, it may find that there are no differences, in which case
hopes may be raised for empirically generalisable theories that can effectively span
countries, continents, and cultures.
Operational Definition
A "large company" is a company with at least 1,000 employees.
The next chapter will look at the academic literature and will try to define
terms such as culture, conflict, and conflict management, and introduce measures for
these constructs.
Chapter 2
Literature Review In this chapter, after a brief historical background, the issues of culture are
explored, divided into national culture and organisational culture, conflict, in the order
of definition, description of conflict types, approaches of conflict management and
conflict handling styles. Among others, the studies of Hofstede and Rahim will be
introduced.
Historical Background
There have been numerous studies on culture, starting in the early 20th
century: Employees as humans was "discovered" in the 1930s with the Human
Relations school (Hofstede, 1993). Managers as humans was introduced in the late
1940s by Herbert Simon's "bounded rationality" (Ibid.).
A Dutch professor, Dr. Geert Hofstede, founded and managed the Personnel
Research department of IBM Europe in the period 1965-1971. During this time, he
interviewed over 116,000 IBM employees in 64 countries around the world and came
up with four dimensions of National Cultures (Hofstede, 1980), which were later
expanded by adding a fifth dimension (Hofstede, 1991). Hofstede is the sole biggest
contributor to the measurement of different cultures; however, his research in
Thailand was conducted on the Thai branch of IBM, a US-American MNC.
6
Culture
How conflicts are managed within a company depends on the corporate
culture of the particular company. The corporate culture in turn depends very much on
the national culture in which the individuals, the members of the organisation, grew
up, and in which the national culture of the country the company is located. Hofstede
(1992, 1993) said that national culture is stronger than any organisational culture, as it
represents the values and beliefs any given person grew up with, and these values and
beliefs are much stronger than those of an organisational culture.
But what is culture? Thai classical music and silk dresses are certainly part of
the Thai culture, but that is not the aspect I will focus on in this research paper.
Hofstede (1993) understood culture as a “construct”, i.e. an abstract concept which
cannot be simply observed, but which can be inferred from the way people of one
culture communicate and behave, verbally and non-verbally. Knowing the culture of
any given country or organisation could give us suggestions for the prediction of other
verbal and non-verbal behaviour; and the behaviour of Thai people in conflict
situations is the focus in this research paper.
In the context of the paper, culture is defined in a broader context. According
to Hofstede (1993), who compares culture to a forest and the individuals to the trees
in it, a forest consists of more than just trees: it is a symbiosis of different trees with
other flora and with the fauna, the birds, the squirrels, and also the micro-organisms.
If we only describe the forest’s most typical trees, we miss the essence of the forest:
we miss the part that distinguishes a forest from a bunch of tress. Likewise, culture
7
cannot be described if we study and log the characteristics of a typical individual.
Most of the available management literature tends to look at individuals in different
countries and jump from their behaviour to conclusions about cultural differences
(Hofstede, 1993).
Such a conclusion is treacherous, because culture is the underlying framework
of these behaviours; the behaviours themselves are not synonymous to culture.
Culture is a framework around both the objective reality, which is manifested in
societal institutions, and subjective reality, which are the beliefs and other
predispositions that individuals have developed during on their socialisation. These
are of course different for each individual, and the members of an organisation
communicate with each other through different means and thus form a common
culture (Acharya, 2003). This aspect will become highly interesting for this research
paper, because it will explore two conflicting cultures and socialisations
communicating with each other in the MNC: the home and the host country cultures
the expatriate managers and the local managers and staff grew up in respectively.
Since the behaviour--both the behavioural intentions as well as the patterns of
behaviour--of an individual are influenced by the culture, or more precisely by the
values and beliefs held by the individual (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), we can already
hypothesise that the meeting of the two cultures will result in a hybrid conflict
management style.
Behaviours indicating Thai values and beliefs include "Kreng Jai" and "Mai
Pen Rai". "Mai Pen Rai", which translates into "never mind" or "it doesn't matter",
8
can be observed often in Thailand and is the manifestation of the belief that one must
gracefully submit to external forces beyond one's control (Sirivun, 2001: 26).
"Kreng Jai" is more difficult to describe. Sirivun compared it to the Buddhist
values of being satisfied with what one owns or has fully learned, and not bother
others. Holmes (1995: 46ff) described "Kreng Jai" as a behaviour restricting one's
own interest or desire, which is displayed "when there is potential for discomfort or
conflict". This is congruent with the Thai society being a highly collectivist society
(Hofstede, 1980), in which the comfort of the group--or the other person--is more
important than one's own.
As an example of European cultures as opposed to the Thai culture, Germany
has been chosen, as Germany is a founding member of the European Union (EU) and
its predecessors (European Union, 2004), Germany is one of the most populous
countries in the EU (Integration Office of Switzerland, 2004), and Germany is the
biggest economy in Europe - in fact, the thrid biggest in the world, after USA and
Japan (Economist, 2002; Kopper 2002).
German values include an emphasis on consensus and cooperative decision-
making; and at least within companies, this means that problems need to be solved so
that all members of the organisation feel comfortable with it (Ferner, Quintanilla and
Varul, 2001). A "Krang Jai" factor would be counterproductive to the German work
ethos, in which the "Betriebsgemeinschaft" (work community) includes all staff. This
is in accordance with a low Power Distance Index (Hofstede, 1980; see next chapter
for explanation).
9
For this study, Hofstede’s (1993) definition saying that culture is "collective
mental programming" has been adopted. Culture is that part of our programming
which is shared with other members of our nation, region, or group, but not with
members of other nations, regions, or groups (Hofstede 1993).
A closer look at this programming, the set of values and beliefs we have
internalised and which determine our behavioural intentions, reveals that Kluckholm
(1951, in: Triandis, 1980b: 75) found that a value is a conception. This conception
may be implicit or explicit, the owner of the value may directly or indirectly refer to it
in a given situation, and it may be characteristic for only a particular individual, or for
"a group of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means
and ends of action".
Combining this with Hofstede's programming above, we conclude that the
programming by the group (or nation) is in the direction that is considered desirable
by that group. This is confirmed by Zavalkoni (in: Triandis, 1980b: 74), who finds
that "values refer to orientations towards what is considered desirable or preferable by
social actors." These social actors are the members of our group or nation, and are the
ones through who environmental pressures are perceived, which stand in relationship
to human desires; the orientation results from the combination of the pressure from
the social group and the desires we have, so that the desires go into a common
direction.
10
The mechanics of this value orientation work in a very complicated pattern of
principles. These principles result from what the individual has learned cognitively or
through affection or direction, a learning process giving order and direction to a
steady flow of acts and thoughts, which have the purpose of solving the group's (or
society's) problems. Or, as Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961, as quoted in Triandis,
1980b: 82) put it: Value orientations are a "complex but definitely patterned (rank-
ordered) principles, resulting from the transactional interplay of the analytically
distinguishable elements of the evaluative process--the cognitive, the affective and the
directive elements--which gave order and direction to the ever-flowing stream of
human acts and thoughts as these relate to the solution of 'common human problems'".
How values and practices interact, can be seen here:
Figure 1: Cultural differences: National, occupational, and organisational level. Source: Hofstede (1990)
11
As we have seen above, Thai and German values are rather different. A Thai
branch of a German MNC will show German values, as Ferner, Quintanilla and Varul
(2001) elaborated, but they also showed that the home country effect was moderated
or even overruled by a host country effect. They further stated that German MNCs
were very capable of adapting to local cultures, but did so in a distinct "German way".
This led to hybrid HR and IR processes in their research.
Cultures are separated into national culture and organisational (for example
corporate) cultures. A national culture is the culture of an entire nation, the common
values and beliefs of the majority of the population, as defined above. An
organisational culture is "a common perception held by the organization's members; a
system of shared meaning" (Robbins, 2001: 510).
Hofstede (1993) believed that the difference between national cultures and
organisational cultures is that national cultures can be told apart by the fundamental,
invisible values that were instilled in most of the populace during their childhood, and
that means that these cultures cannot change; or if they do, this is a very slow process.
Organisational cultures, on the other hand, are much more superficial and “reside in
the visible practices of the organisation”. Therefore, he said, organisational cultures
can consciously be changed. Ferner, Quintanilla and Varul (2001) however made a
difference between Anglo-Saxon and German corporate cultures insofar as the Anglo-
Saxon corporate culture is consciously set by the company and internally marketed
with Mission and Vision Statements, whereas the traditional German corporate
culture has grown from inside. However, more and more German MNCs adapt, or try
to adapt, to the Anglo-Saxon way, since they increasingly feel the pressure of
12
shareholders as they move away from the traditional family-owned business. Many
German companies that were family-owned for a century or two are now publicly
traded stock corporations. This will be true for German MNCs maintaining large
branches or subsidiaries in Thailand.
In order to understand the difference between national and organisational
culture, we will now take a look at what exactly national cultures on the one hand, and
organisational cultures on the other hand, are, and how they can be measured.
1. National Culture
Hofstede (1980) conducted research in 40 countries in 1968 and, as a follow-
up, in 1972. Later, the number was increased to 50 countries and 3 regions (therefore
comprising a total of 64 countries). He surveyed a total of more than 116,000 people
and came up with four dimensions along which cultures can be measured. For each
country an index was found for each dimension. The dimensions and their indices are:
1. Power-Distance (PDI): The degree of inequality among people which the population of a country considers as normal.
2. Individualism (IDV): The degree to which people in a country prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of the group.
3. Masculinity (MAS) and its opposite, Femininity: The degree to which tough values like assertiveness, performance, success and competition (associated with men's roles in many societies) prevail over tender values like the quality of life, maintaining warm personal relationships, service, care for the weak, and solidarity, which in many societies are more associated with women's roles.
4. Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI): The degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations. Structured situations are those in which there are clear rules as to how one should behave.
13
On the basis of a later research, which was conducted by Michael Harris Bond
(Hofstede 1993), Hofstede added a fifth dimension:
5. Long-term versus short-term orientation (LTO): The degree to which values are oriented towards the future, like thrift (savings) and persistence; on the short-term side one finds values rather oriented towards the past and present, like respect for tradition and fulfilling social obligations. Here are some example values: Table 1: Examples of Cultural Dimensions Adapted from: Hofstede (n.d.) *The European average exists only as a graph on the website; the actual values are not published, so the values shown here are estimated from what the graphs seems to show. Country PD
IIDV
MAS
UAI
LTO
Thailand 64 20 34 64 56Asian Average 71 53 58France 68 71 43 86United Kingdom 35 89 66 35 25Germany 35 67 66 65 31European
Average* 40 55 53 70
USA 40 91 62 46 29World Average 55 43 50 64 45
What makes Thailand unique in the world is that it has its highest peaks on
Power-Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance. Furthermore, the Masculinity index is
with 34 very low; the world average is 50, and the Asian average is 53. This makes
Thailand a country with people whose values stand for the quality rather than the
quantity of life, and for warm relationships, with the group and the society more
important than the individual, while at the same time looking forward to the future
and having high respect for those in high places. This is consistent with the fact that
Thailand is a constitutional monarchy headed by a benevolent king who is revered
and loved throughout the country, and who is the longest-reigning monarch in the
world; he stands for many values embedded in the national culture; ranging from
14
caring for the weak to having a feeling of security. Most Thai people have known
only the present king during their lifetime.
European countries, on the other hand, have a very low Power Distance Index.
Superiors are not revered but considered people who have a different job to do than
ourselves, but we are all part of the same team. Government officials are often
considered much more as "civil servants", i.e. people who serve the public who pay
their salaries through the taxes. Germany's Individuality Index at 67, France's at 71,
and the UK's at 89 are well above the world's average (43) and very much higher than
Thailand's (20). Of 38.456 million households in Germany in 2001, 14.056 million
(36.55%) were one-person households and 12.904 million (33.56%) were two-person
households (Federal Statistical Office, 2003). Germany's and the UK's Masculinity
Indices (both 66) are the 9th-highest in the surveyed world of 53 countries and regions,
and Thailand's (34) is one of the lowest (44th). This shows a significant difference in
values such as assertiveness and material success on the one hand, and modesty and
tenderness on the other hand. Germany's and Thailand's Uncertainty Avoidance
Indices are almost en par. In Hofstede's research, Germany has a very low Long-
Term-Orientation Index, but I will take that with a grain of salt, as Germany was at
the time of survey (1968 and 1972) still struggling with its past. Also, that LTO may
have been influenced by the fact that Germany was still divided into East and West at
the time, and it represented the border between the two blocks of the Cold War. The
Cold War is over and Germany has been reunited for so long that today's teenagers
know about "two Germanys" only from history books. While this is particularly
significant for Germany, the end of the Cold War will be very significant for other
European countries as well.
15
Trompenaars (1993) also tried to figure out how to describe and measure
cultural values. He came up with seven dimensions:
1. Universalism vs Pluralism (rules and procedures or relationships) 2. Individualism vs Communitarianism (me or the group) 3. Specific vs Diffuse (superficial or deep relationships; are bits of life
kept apart or brought together) 4. Neutrality vs Affectivity (conceal or show emotions) 5. Inner directed vs Outer directed (the environment around) 6. Achieved status vs Ascribed status (from who you are or what you do)\ 7. Sequential time vs Synchronic time (one after another or all at once).
Hofstede (1996) took it on himself to peer-review Trompenaars' work and
found out that Individualism and Achievement are correlated, so that there is virtually
no difference between the measures. At the same time Universalism and Diffuse are
correlated. All of these are also correlated to Hofstede's own Individualism
dimension. Hofstede furthermore criticises the methodology, as in his opinion,
Trompenaars made the mistake of not being neutral in his analysis: "It is evident that
Trompenaars confuses conceptual categories with dimensions. Conceptual categories
are present in the mind of any investigator who sets out to do research. They belong to
the culture of the person or persons who designed them - in Trompenaars' case
American sociologists and anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s."
Another model, which builds on Hofstede's initial four-dimensional model and
adds two new ones, was introduced by Elenkov (1997):
1. Power Distance 2. Individualism: The degree to which people in a country prefer to act as
individuals rather than as members of the group. 3. Masculinity vs Femininity 4. Uncertainty Avoidance: The degree to which people in a country prefer
structured over unstructured situations. Structured situations are those in which there are clear rules as to how one should behave.
5. Machiavellianism (use of social power and informal influence) 6. Dogmatism (lack of tolerance of new ideas introduced by others)
16
Using different methods will lead to different results. As several
measurements are well-established, Matsumoto, Grissom and Dinnel (2001) suggest
to not only rely on the most popular methods when measuring cultures. For the
purpose of this study, This paper will, however, stick to Hofstede's cultural
dimensions, because this model is the most widely cited, and the most comprehensive,
and questioned and proven many times in the past 23 years.
Other authors, while not disclaiming the existence of cultural differences,
question their importance. Jagadish (2003) showed in her study how a problem at the
Indian branch of a European company was attributed to cultural problems between the
expatriate manager and the native staff. It turned out that the problem was not due a
cultural misunderstanding, but it was a common communication problem, which can
also happen at any local company. She concluded that cultural differences should not
be overestimated. This would lead us to think that whether the companies surveyed
are Thai companies or Thai branches of MNCs will have no impact on the research
results.
LeBel (2003) went one step further: He detected significant differences in
macro-economic patterns related to growth between Sub-Saharan African countries
and East Asian countries, and explained this with indices of economic freedom. He
found that they are correlated to each other, even without taking cultural aspects, or
any of Hofstede's dimensions, into account. "Growth in real per capita income
depends in a first instance on a country's rate of saving and its capital output ration"
(Ibid., p. 564). Thus, growth--and communal and individual increase of welfare--is
not dependent on the culture.
17
Since a number of authors opined that cultural differences play a minor role at
the most, we could assume that the reason may be that the cultures of many nations
are becoming more homogenous. After all, Hofstede's original surveys were
conducted over 30 years ago, and due to globalisation, MTV, CNN and BBC World,
ESPN and others, and the world in general getting smaller not least because of the
internet, it would make sense to assume that especially city dwellers are increasingly
homogenised in their tastes, needs and lifestyles. This would in turn lead to economic
patterns independent of the original national culture in any given country, as the
national cultures shift towards each other. Alas, this homogenisation does not take
place, as de Mooij and Hofstede (2002) found out: the opposite is the case.
Multinational retailers have found out that consumer behaviour differs a lot due to
cultural differences, to the extent that large retail companies had to close stores in
some countries while the stores with the same design, marketing concepts and choice
of goods were very successful in other countries. This huge difference was not only
observed between countries across continents, but also between EU member
countries, for example. This is an indication that the different cultures of home and
host countries do matter. This is an apparent contradiction to the above.
Francesco and Gold (1997: 33) addressed this contradiction and identified
forces for convergence of national cultures and stated the presence of McDonald's
restaurants in virtually every country as an example, but they also identified forces for
divergence of cultures: having a McDonald's hamburger in the U.S. is a cheap
convenience, whereas in Moscow or Beijing it is trendy and the cost is well above the
cost of an average meal.
18
In summary, the literature does not provide a conclusive answer to whether
cultural differences are important.
2. Organisational Culture
Schein (1995: 9) defined organisational culture as "a pattern of basic
assumptions--invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope
with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration--that has worked well
enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the
correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems".
Robbins (2001: 510) defined organisational culture as "a common perception
held by the organization's members; a system of shared meaning". We notice that he
talked about perception, not about values. Neither Schein nor Robbins talked about
fixed cultural rules in organisations; they are either an "assumption" (Schein) or a
"perception" (Robbins).
Apparently, this common perception is highly influenced by the
national culture, as both Bennett (1999) and Hofstede (1980) pointed out. That
influence is also the reason why Zakaria (2000) concluded that expatriate managers
need cross-cultural training in order to work effectively with their native co-workers.
Tse (1988) found out that the home culture has influence on decision-making;
however, since his research subjects were executives working in their own home
countries and not as expatriates, the question whether the home country of the
19
executive has more or less influence than the home country of the branch office (i.e.
the national culture in which the company or branch office is located) remains open.
Deal and Kennedy (1982) took a close look at corporate cultures. They
found that there are five elements of culture: (1) The business environment, such as
products, competitors, customers etc, were considered to have the biggest impact on
the corporate culture. (2) Values, defined as basic concepts and beliefs of the
organisation, form the heart of the corporate culture. An individual following these
well-propagated values within the company will be successful within the company.
(3) Heroes. These can for example be the founder of the company or the Employee of
the Month. Heroes personify the values and preserve what makes the company
special. They provide role models to follow, set the standards of performance, and
make success available and thus motivate employees. They also represent the
company to the outside world. Colonel Sanders of KFC would be such a hero, very
much like the employee of the month publicly announced on a plaque for all
employees and customers to see. (4) The Rites and Rituals, which are systematic and
programmed routines of the day-to-day life in the company. These are sometimes play
(like a monthly dinner with the sales staff), sometimes ritual, and sometimes
ceremony. Each ritual symbolises a belief central to the company's culture. For
example, shaking the hand of everybody in an office every morning and every
evening symbolises "we are a team". Without the connection to the belief, the ritual
will be a mere habit. Rituals are practiced every day, whereas ceremonies are
something special. A ceremony is for example the annual Christmas party, where the
whole corporate culture is on display, and positive memories are created in the
participants' memories. (5) The cultural network. This is the informal communication
20
network; Deal and Kennedy explained this network in detail and pointed out why it is
necessary to work the network in order to understand a company.
Hofstede (1990) explained that his earlier studies on national culture
did not reveal anything about corporate culture, as all units studied belonged to the
same company and therefore the same corporate culture. His new studies were about
corporate culture and he concluded that there are visible parts of a culture, which he
called "practices", but the core consists of values, in the sense of broad, non-specific
feelings of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, normal and abnormal, or rational and
irrational.
A graphic representation of how organisational culture manifests itself from
the shallow to the deep can be seen here:
Figure 2: Manifestation of Culture: From the Shallow to the Deep Source: Hofstede (1990)
21
Symbols are words, gestures, pictures or objects that carry particular meaning
within a culture.
Heroes are people, dead or alive, that are highly respected in the organisation.
Rituals are activities that are carried out by the members of the organisation,
but which have no technical necessity. They are carried out for their own sake.
These three layers of the "onion" can be summarised as Practices. The core,
however, are the values that cannot be seen but only inferred.
If we compare Hofstede with Deal and Kennedy (1982), we see that both
models show the "values" as the core. Heroes and Rituals are defined similarly, but
Hofstede does not mention the business environment at all. As a reason, we can
assume that he found in his extensive research that the same general structures for
organisational cultures hold true, regardless of the industry or other outside influences
(except the national culture). Neither does Hofstede mention the cultural network. A
reason may be that he found the cultural network is a result of the organisational
culture.
In his study, Hofstede found out that practices (Symbols, Heroes, Rituals) are
related to organisations; each organisation has different practices. But he also found
out that the values do not differ too much across organisations, but they differ when
compared across countries. People's values in different companies over different
countries depends more on the nationality, as well as education, seniority, age and
hierarchical level (Hofstede, 1990: 21, 26). However, this research did not include
22
expatriates, so we don't know whether the nationality in which the company is located
supersedes the nationality in which the manager grew up, or the other way around.
However, in this study, Hofstede identified six dimensions against which
organisational cultures can be measured:
1. Process versus Results Orientation 2. Employee versus Job Orientation 3. Parochial versus Professional 4. Open versus Closed System 5. Loose versus Tight Control 6. Normative versus Pragmatic
Robbins (2001: 510f) describes a seven-dimensional model:
1. Innovation and risk taking: the degree to which employees are encouraged to be innovative and take risks.
2. Attention to detail: The degree to which employees are expected to exhibit precision, analysis, and attention to detail.
3. Outcome orientation. The degree to which management focuses on results or outcomes rather than on the techniques and processes used to achieve these outcomes.
4. People orientation. The degree to which management decisions take into consideration the effect of outcomes on people within the organisation.
5. Team orientation. The degree to which work activities are organised around teams rather than individuals.
6. Aggressiveness. The degree to which people are aggressive and competitive rather than easygoing.
7. Stability. The degree to which organisational activities emphasise maintaining the status quo in contrast to growth.
This research will not measure the organisational culture of the companies
surveyed. It is important to know that organisational culture exists and that it is
measurable; and that it is influenced by the national culture and a number of other
factors. However, the result of this research paper cannot be interpreted if the concept
of organisational cultures is not known. I will be measuring conflict management
styles, and these are part of the corporate culture, but corporate culture as such is a
much broader field.
23
Conflict
1. What is a conflict?
This question appears to be difficult to answer, as there are several definitions
around. Thomas (1992) defined conflict as "the process that begins when one party
perceives that the other has negatively affected, or is about to negatively affect
something that he or she cares about". Robbins (2001) shared this definition. Walker
(n.d.) offered six more definitions. Wall and Callister (1995) did a thorough review of
the literature and found that most definitions of conflict agree that conflict is a
process, and that it involves two or more parties. One of these parties must perceive
the opposition of the other.
A conflict does not arise if the two or more participants are of different
opinions, but when the participants act according to their opinions or goals, and the
actions are competing, as shown in the following graph:
24
Figure 3: Conflict situation versus conflict Source: Jost (1999: 17)
Cooperative and competing interests are independent from each other. I can
have an interest that is in competition with my counterpart, but at the same time have
a desire to cooperate; a potential conflict will arise but it will not develop into a
conflict. We can have non-competing interests, but if we have no cooperative interests
a conflict can easily arise.
2. Types of conflict
There are different kinds of conflicts. Tse (1994) differentiates between
person-related and task-related conflicts. In this research, we will look only at person-
related conflicts. Rahim (1986) refined these person-related conflicts and expanded to
groups:
1. Intrapersonal conflict: When the member of the organisation is required to perform tasks which doe not match his/her expertise, interests, goals or values.
2. Interpersonal conflict: Conflict between two members of the organisation.
Cooperative Interests Competing Interests
No Conflict Conflict
Conflict Situation (potential conflict)
25
3. Intragroup conflict: Conflict among members of a group, or between subgroups.
4. Intergroup conflict: Conflict between two or more units or groups of the organisation. Example: production vs. marketing, or HQ vs. field staff.
The kind of person-related conflicts this research has looked at are
interpersonal conflicts, i.e. the conflict between two people. It has been explored how
personal conflicts that arise among peers or with superiors or subordinates are dealt
with, and whether there is a difference between the Thai companies and the foreign
MNCs.
3. Managing conflicts
Ross and DeWine (1984) found relations between interpersonal needs (i.e.
inclusion, control, and affection) and three styles of conflict management (namely
focus on self, focus on issue, and focus on other). They found that:
1. A person who has a need to control others is self-focused in conflicts
2. A person who has a high need for expressed affection tends to be focused on issue during conflict
3. Expressed inclusion is correlated with other focus 4. A person wanting others to control him or her is more
concerned with the relationship in a conflict than about resolving the conflict itself.
Ruble and Thomas (1976) classified conflict management approaches in two
dimensions:
1. Assertiveness: The degree to which a party to the conflict is interested in satisfying his/her needs.
2. Cooperativeness: The degree to which a party to a conflict is interested in focussing on the needs of others.
26
These definition approaches from Ross and DeWine as well as Ruble and
Thomas show us the root of interpersonal conflicts; what is going on at the inside of
them. Regardless of the issue discussed, a conflict will arise when both participants
are self-focussed or lack cooperativeness. Hofstede (1980) taught us that the Thai
society is collective, i.e. focussed on the group rather than the self, and the German
society is individualistic, i.e. focussed on self. This must lead to different styles in
dealing with emerging conflicts in a company.
But how to manage a conflict? There are different models that describe the
choices the parties to a conflict have. Buller et al. (1991) suggested five choices to the
conflicting parties:
1. Avoiding: One party chooses to ignore the conflict, so it remains unsolved.
2. Forcing: One party imposes his will on the other. 3. Education-Persuasion: Using well-established means of
communicating and converting others to one's opinion. 4. Negotiation-Compromise: Both parties give up something to
negotiate a settlement. Usually one or both parties feel dissatisfied.
5. Collaboration-Problem solving: Both parties choose to confront the conflict directly and collaborate to develop a mutually satisfying solution: a win-win situation.
Chung (2000) offered four choices:
1. Smoothing: emphasise commonalties, and de-emphasise differences.
2. Forcing: Exert one's viewpoint at the expense of another, often leading to a win/lose situation.
3. Compromising: Determine acceptable solutions; conflicting parties need a give-and-take attitude but will each reach some degree of satisfaction.
4. Confrontation: Face or confront conflict directly with a problem-solving attitude and generate the "best" solution, even though the original parties may need to be modified or discarded. Both parties set out to seek a win-win situation.
27
Robbins (2001) offered again different categories, but there are no surprises,
as all authors appear to have found similar choices:
1. Competing: A desire to satisfy one's interests, regardless of the impact on the other party to the conflict
2. Collaborating: A situation in which the parties to a conflict each desire to satisfy fully the concerns of all parties
3. Avoiding: The desire to withdraw from or suppress a conflict 4. Accommodating: The willingness of one party in a conflict to a
please the opponent's interests above their own 5. Compromising: A situation in which each party to a conflict is
willing to give up something
Rahim and Bonoma (1979; also see Rahim, 1992) measured
interpersonal conflict management styles along two dimensions: concern for
self (the degree to which a person attempts to satisfy his or her own concerns)
and concern for others (the degree to which a person wants to satisfy the
concerns of others), as mentioned above. These dimensions lead to five
specific conflict management styles:
Figure 4: The styles of handling interpersonal conflict Source: Rahim (1983)
28
1. Integrating (Collaborating; interaction leads to win-win) 2. Obliging (Accommodating; neglecting own concern leads to
lose-win) 3. Dominating (Competing; aggressiveness leads to win-lose) 4. Avoiding (both parties refrain from communicating their needs,
leading to lose-lose) 5. Compromising (both parties give up something to reach
mutually acceptable solution, leading to no-win/no-lose).
These five resulting conflict management styles can also be shown with
regards to distributive and integrative dimensions:
Figure 5: The basic dimensions of conflict management styles Source: Bilsky and Wülker (2000: 5) In this research, Rahim's model, as this model is very widely used in conflict
management research and generally accepted in the academic world. Rahim is
considered one of the highest authorities in the are of Conflict Management.
29
However, like all of the conflict management styles introduced in this chapter,
Rahim's model also shows a distinctively Western flavour. He shows the Avoiding
style as resulting from low concern for others and low concern for self; he describes
the result as a lose-lose situation, which is a negative label. As Hofstede (1993)
already mentioned: "American culture profile is reflected in American management
theories". Tjosvold and Sun (2002) already argued that conflict avoidance need not be
considered negative, as it is in Western cultures: in collectivist societies, avoidance is
thought to be the most commonly used style. The reason is that people have strong
relationships and rely on each other. This way, conflict avoidance, if carefully used
within a collectivist society, has a positive effect.
Regardless of the labelling Rahim assigns to the five styles, the theory that his
five styles exist in this form and can be measured, is widely accepted.
According to studies conducted in 1983 and 1991 using the survey form
ROCI-II in the USA, Integrating is the most frequently preferred style, and
Compromising is the second-most frequently preferred style (Sirivun, 2001: 19f).
In Thailand, Sirivun (2001) found that Integrating is the most commonly used
conflict management style, Compromising is the second-most commonly used
conflict management style. Dominating is the least common style. He confirms this
order of preferred style across managers and students (so that his study was
comparable to Rahim's), but he also found that there is no difference between men
and women, or between managers and students. This means that there is no difference
30
between Thailand and the US; contrary to Hofstede's beliefs, national culture does not
seem to have any influence.
This is an interesting result, as Leung, Koch and Lin (2002) stated that conflict
avoidance is common in East Asia, but they surveyed only Confucian countries.
Lagao (1997) surveyed Filipino and Caucasian managers and found that the Filipinos
used Integrating as the first and Compromising as the second most frequently used
conflict management style as well. The Philippines is a predominantly Catholic
country, so Buddhist values as in Thailand or Western values as in the USA don't
apply as strongly, but still, the Philippines is an Asian country and shows the same
primary conflict management style preference.
What the three studies have in common is that they surveyed only
managers and students, the educationally privileged. The study conducted by Sirivun
in Thailand was even conducted only in English.
Kozan (1999) conducted intra-cultural conflict management research
in Turkey, where within the culture one group was Westernised. Avoidance was
preferred by those who held traditional values, and Integration only by the
Westernised group. This could indicate that a similar situation occurs in Thailand,
with the Western influence stronger in foreign MNCs than in Thai companies.
31
Tactics and Strategies
Glenn (1981) offered three models according to which conflicts are being
handled. These are: The Confrontational model (in which the conflict will be analysed
and the parties will reach reasonable compromise in order to solve the problem), the
Harmony model (an emphasis is put on harmony and face rather than rules, and
values in the organisation are set so that observance of mutual obligations and status
orderings minimise the occurrence of conflict and prefer avoidance and
accommodation styles) and the Regulative model (rules and regulations are used to
minimise conflicts or to aid avoidance). Obviously, the Harmony model fits into an
Asian society like in Thailand, and the Confrontational model fits into a Western
society; the German society in particular traditionally follows the Regulative model
but in recent years tends towards the Confrontational model. In the West, conflict is
seen in a positive way, as any problems are being brought out into the open so that
they can be dealt with, whereas in Asia, conflict is seen in a negative way, as it will
most likely make someone "lose face". Losing or gaining face is a very important
concept in Asia, as Kim and Nam (1998) elaborate.
Another model of conflict handling was identified by Arnold and Fadely
(1986): Apologia can be used to manage conflict, reduce dissonance, and institute
damage control. The four strategies of apologia are: 1. Denial, 2. bolstering, 3.
differentiation, 4. transcendence.
Francesco and Gold (1997: 76ff) differentiated between verbal and non-verbal
negotiation tactics. Conflict management research and negotiation research is closely
32
related, as in both cases the two or more parties communicate to resolve a discrepancy
in goals. The following tactics therefore apply if and when a communication takes
place. The verbal negotiating tactics named as follows:
1. Promise 2. Threat 3. Recommendation 4. Warning 5. Reward 6. Punishment 7. Normative Appeal 8. Commitment 9. Self-Disclosure 10. Question 11. Command
The non-verbal tactics, on the other hand, are:
1. Silence 2. Conversational overlaps 3. Facial glazing 4. Touching
We can easily see that these tactics are culture-bound, as touching is a no-no
in Thailand, and Conversational Overlaps (interrupting the other party) is considered
impolite; they are perfectly normal in Brasil. Francesco and Gold also noted that in
conflict handling, people from high-context countries (those with a high Power-
Distance Index) "behave in ways that appear harmonious on the surface"; differences
in opinion and real feelings are communicated through implicit language and non-
verbally, whereas people from low-context countries (those with a low PDI) prefer
direct words and use an open approach in order to solve problems (see Confrontation
in Chung's (2000) choice of conflict handling styles).
33
We have seen that the cultures in different countries can lead to
different values, which in turn require different conflict management styles within
companies. We have further seen that multinational companies bring part of their
national culture to their branch offices in different host countries; especially when
these branch offices are headed by the home countries' nationals. However, these
companies also have to adapt to their host countries to an undetermined degree, so
that their organisational culture is a hybrid of the home and host countries.
No research has been done yet on conflict management styles within a
large Thai company across all levels. All research in this area has either been
conducted on MNCs or only at the management level, or with students. Past research
shows that Integrating is the most preferred conflict management style in companies,
even though in general, Avoidance should be the preferred conflict management style
in Thailand, which has a highly collectivist society.
Summary
There are several theories about cultural dimensions. One of the
dominant ones is Hofstede's theory, measuring cultures in five dimensions, namely
Power Distance, Individuality, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance and Long-Term
Orientation.
Conflict management is another field in which many theories have been
produced. One of the leading theories is Rahim's, which comprises of five different
conflict management styles, namely Integrating, Dominating, Avoiding, Obliging and
Compromising.
34
There are theories that the cultural values have influence on the conflict
management styles. When Rahim (2001) said that "influence of cultural variables [on
CM styles] is subtle", it does not mean such an influence does not exist. More
specifically, the Individualism-Collectivism dimension is often cited, and Morris
(1998) stated that when comparing US managers and Asian managers, US managers
have been found in many research works to be more inclined towards Competing,
while Asian managers are more inclined towards Avoiding.
This research thesis intends to test whether, in the Thai Modern Trade
industry, a relationship between the cultural dimensions of a company's home country
have influence on the preferred conflict management style. The next chapter will
discuss the methodology and explain how the research was conducted.
Chapter 3
Research Methodology
Conceptual Framework
This chapter will explain the methodology used to explore the conflict
management styles in Thai versus multinational companies in Bangkok. In order to do
so, I limit the research to one industry in order to make the results from the Thai and
the multinational companies comparable.
The following concepts build up the framework:
1. In Thai companies located in Thailand and headed by a Thai manager, the
Thai national culture is the only national culture that affects the organisational culture,
and therefore the conflict management styles.
2. Thai branches of multinational companies located in Thailand and headed
by a national of each company's home country, is influenced by two national cultures,
that of the respective home country and that of Thailand. The result is a hybrid
conflict management style.
3. In the Thai branches of MNCs, the degree of the influence of foreign
conflict management styles on companies in Thailand depends on how far or close the
Thai individual is from the foreign manager on the organisational level. The
36
demographics part of the questionnaire will give the respondents five choices, one of
which they have to choose: Top Management, Middle Management, Lower
Management, Clerical Staff (office workers) and Non-clerical Staff. The exact borders
between especially the management levels may not be well defined for the
respondent, so it is partly a self-evaluation.
4. With increasing education, Thai people's preferred CM style shifts from
Avoidance towards integrating.
Combining these concepts into a framework can be visualised as follows:
Figure 6: Conceptual Framework
Research Design, Population and Sample
Research was conducted on two groups of companies, one consisting of Thai
companies and the other one consisting of Thai branches of foreign multinational
companies. The size of these companies should be large enough to warrant distinct
National Culture (Thailand)
Foreign National Culture
Organisational Culture
Hybrid Conflict Management styles
Degree of influence determined by: 1. Foreign MNC headed by expatriate 2. Thai company headed by locally
educated Thai national
Degree of influence determined by: 1. Distance to foreign manager. 2. Education
H3
H2 H1
H4
37
hierarchical levels, and they should be comparable in size. The industry in which this
research was conducted is the Modern Trade industry in Bangkok.
Table 2: Sample and Population
Companies Surveyed
Year of Establishment in
Thailand
Number of Employees
Questionnaires returned
Foreign Companies: A 1996 1809 95B 1998 6652 86G 1994 11500 30
19961 211Thai Companies: C 1996 1600 45D 2000 1171 37E 1997 2100 50F 1984 1400 100
6271 232
Total 26232 443
The population in this study is all the staff of these companies. This does not
cover the whole Modern Trade Industry in Thailand, as this thesis is about proof-of-
concept. The results will be valid for the companies in this study, and final
conclusions about the preferred conflict management styles in Thai companies in
general cannot be drawn. However, important indications could be found; and future
research can be designed with these important findings in mind.
Non-probability sampling has been used, convenience sampling (Zikmund,
1994: 367) to be exact. The reason is that the research could only be conducted in
companies to which direct or indirect personal contacts existed. A questionnaire was
e-mailed to the appropriate distributor in the target companies with the request to print
and copy for 200 staff of all organisational levels. All companies advised that 200 is
38
too high a number and would disrupt the work flow, so between 30 and 100
questionnaires were returned per company.
An advantage of convenience sampling as the sampling technique is that there
is no need for a list of population. (Ibid., p.378). This is relevant to this research,
because there is no list of how many employees are in each organisational level at
each company.
The sample covered all ranks from top management to workers and
messengers. The companies all have over 1,000 staff each in order to ensure that a
formal structure exists internally. For companies of this large size, an industrial-style
hierarchical structure is necessary so that the companies will be comparable; SMEs,
especially Thai-Chinese family businesses, may have different, often informal
structures.
Also, the hypothesised decreasing home-country effect can be shown more
clearly on large companies where the distances between top management and non-
management staff become significant.
The sample size, which equals the number of returned questionnaires
(Zikmund, 1994: 784) should be within the range of earlier research studies in this
field (Zikmund 1994: 412f). Sirivun (2001) had 432 questionnaires returned (out of
1,000 distributed, giving a return rate of 43%), Kozan (1999) worked with a sample
size 435 respondents, Leung (1992) used 175 subjects. The sample size in this
research study was 443, with 211 usable questionnaires returned from three European
39
MNCs, and 232 from four Thai companies, so the sample size is in accordance with
accepted practice.
A sample size of 384 would have been sufficient for a population of 1,000,000
at a confidence level of 95% (Siegle, n.d.). However, some researchers only suggest
sample size calculations for random sampling (Johnson, 2002; Wasson, 2004).
Independent variables are:
1.) Organisational level (top management, middle management, lower
management, non-managerial office staff, non-office staff).
2.) Education (Thai, international programme in Thailand, Abroad)
3.) Nationality (Thai, Thai-Chinese, Other).
4.) The company's home country (Thailand, Other).
Dependent variables are:
1.) Preferred conflict management style (Integrating, Dominating, Obliging,
Avoiding, Compromising).
As there will be five organisational levels in each company, it will be
interesting to compare these levels with one another, both within the companies as
well as across companies. An ANOVA will be computed from the result of the survey
form.
40
Research Hypotheses
We have seen that conflict management, which is part of the organisational
culture of a company, depends on the national culture. De Mooij and Hofstede (2002)
suggested that a person's values and beliefs are so ingrained in the personality that
they can hardly be changed. For an expatriate manager, this means that he or she
carries his/her home country's national culture around with him/her, while leading the
company and the employees located within another national culture. If a group of
Thai companies and a group of Thai branches of a multinational companies in the
same industry are compared, will differences in conflict management styles be
detected?
Previous research in the field of conflict management has been conducted on
Thai branches of international corporations. In order to measure the conflict
management style that corresponds to the Thai culture, the subject companies have to
be Thai companies. A "Thai company" is a company that is owned and managed by
Thai people, and is located in Thailand. Since much research on national cultures has
been done on different national branches of multinational companies in order to
eliminate the distortion that would be caused by different corporate cultures of
different companies, it is implied that the corporate culture of a multinational is
strongly influenced by the national culture of the country in which the head office is
located. It follows that if the head office is located in Thailand, the corporate or
organisational culture of the company must be different from that of a local branch of
a multinational company. Conflict management styles are part of the organisational
culture. Research in Thailand has shown that Integrating is the preferred conflict
41
management style, but that research was conducted only on managers and students
fluent in English. In this research, I surveyed staff of all organisational levels with a
bilingual questionnaire. Since the overall conflict management style in collectivist
societies is thought to be Avoidance (Tjosvold and Sun, 2002), I expect to find that
this will also be true in the Thai companies.
Hypothesis 1: Avoidance is the preferred conflict management style in Thai
companies.
If H1 is found to be true, it appears to show that that the findings in the
literature are biased towards the manager's home country's norm. The same research
was therefore conducted on multinational companies, in particular their Bangkok
branches, headed by a national of the home country of each MNC. This is a not a
duplication of research already done, since the well-known research by Hofstede was
conducted roughly 30 years ago, and it is possible that the values of the Thai people
have shifted in the meantime. Also, European companies were chosen, and European
styles have presumably changed since the end of the Cold War and the German
reunification and since the shift from family-owned large corporations to stock
corporations in the 1990s.
Sirivun's (2001) research was not conducted on general members of a
company, but was restricted to the managers of those companies; furthermore, the
survey was in English only, excluding Thai people who have not been exposed to
foreign languages and therefore foreign cultures. In order to have comparable data, a
new survey was conducted on Thai branches of European multinational companies,
42
and the research included employees from all organisational levels. It was expected to
find that the manager has such influence on corporate culture and the Conflict
Management styles chosen that the differences are measurable.
Hypothesis 2: Conflict management styles in Thai branch offices of
multinational companies, headed by an expatriate manager, show a shift of preferred
styles from Avoiding towards Integrating.
Furthermore, the conflict management styles were surveyed on all
organisational levels. Logic would imply that the influence of the home country effect
in the MNCs decreases with the organisational distance of a particular staff member
from top management; this means that while Integrating may be preferred at top
management level, Avoidance may be preferred by non-managerial staff.
Hypothesis 3: The home country effect on preferred conflict management
styles within MNC's Thai branches decreases with increasing distance from the top
management level.
While it cannot be assumed that the organisational level of the staff and
managers is dependent on their education, it is interesting to explore whether the
education has an influence on the preferred CM style. It is an exploratory question:
Hypothesis 4: The higher Thai people are educated, the more perceptible is a
shift in preferences of conflict management styles from Avoidance towards
Integrating.
43
Data Collection Method
A copy of the questionnaire was emailed to the person advised by the target
companies. The file was printed out and copied by the company. Each company was
asked to return 200 questionnaires, but they advised that this number would interfere
with the work flow, so they chose to print as many questionnaires as would permit
them to not interrupt their work flow. The number of survey forms per company was
set therefore by the company and ranged from 30 to 100 per company. The companies
were asked to let employees of all organisational levels participate in the survey. The
four Thai companies returned a total of 232 questionnaires, the three MNCs returned
211 questionnaires between them.
The Questionnaire
As mentioned earlier, one of the most popular survey forms is ROCI-II. Rahim
created this form, the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II in 1983, and it is
generally academically accepted for measurement of conflict management styles. The
forms ROCI-IIa, b, and c have been developed, checked and rechecked by Rahim as
well as independent researchers. These forms have so far been used in 215 research
papers, including 63 doctoral dissertations, 17 master's theses and 80 journal articles
(Rahim 2003). The form consists of 28 questions, using a five-point Likert scale.
Another popular form is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
(TKI) (Thomas & Kilmann, 1974). It contains 30 pairs of statements describing
44
possible behavioural responses. For each pair, the respondent is asked to circle the
letter ("A" or "B") of the statement that best characterises their behaviour.
For this paper, a new questionnaire was created. The ideal was to ask three
questions pertaining to each conflict management style, totalling 15 questions, which
should be many enough to measure reliability and few enough to keep the attention of
the respondents. Getting many questionnaires returned that are only half filled out
because the respondents got "bored" half-way through may have difficult implications
for analysis.
Furthermore, a six-point Likert scale should be used. The reason is that due to
the Avoiding style that researchers have found is preferred by Asian people, it is
conceivable that inconvenient questions may be answered with the neutral mark. This
is consistent with the research by Culpepper, Zhao and Lowery (2002) who found that
Asian people use more midpoint responses in tasks not related to hard facts or
accepted wisdom.
A questionnaire with 15 questions was thus designed to measure the five
different conflict management styles according to Rahim (1983): Integrating,
Dominating, Avoiding, Obliging and Compromising. The questionnaire was created
in English and translated into Thai with the help of Thai students knowledgeable of
the subject and also fluent in English. Starting from the three-step language adaptation
that Bilsky and Wülker (2000) used to translate the ROCI-II Conflict Management
Survey Instrument into German, two more steps were added, so that the translation
became a five-step process:
45
1.) Translation from English into Thai.
2.) Rewording of the translation by a Thai who didn't know the original questions.
3.) Re-translation from Thai into English by a third person, who hadn't seen the
previous versions.
4.) Meeting with all translators and the author to discuss whether the original and the
re-translation meant the same, and if not, where the translation could be improved.
5.) A Thai with lower education was asked to read each question and advise what he
understood. This double-check was deemed necessary, as not only very educated
people were surveyed; earlier research by other authors had been restricted to
managers and MBA students.
The bilingual survey instrument can be found in Appendix C. The key between
the questions and the measured conflict management styles is as follows:
Table 3: Conflict management styles key for the questionnaire
Conflict Management Style: Question numbers:
Compromising 2, 6, 10
Dominating 3, 11, 12
Avoiding 9, 13, 15
Obliging 4, 5, 7, 16
Integrating 1, 8, 14
Appendix D shows the demographic data survey instrument.
46
Validity and Reliability: The Pilot Tests
The first pilot test, conducted with 18 subjects, revealed unacceptable
reliability values for the Avoidance construct, were Cronbach's alpha was close to
zero, and Obliging came out with an alpha of 0.25. The wording of some of the
questions was revised with regards to these two constructs, and a second pilot test was
conducted. This second pilot test was conducted with 19 subjects that had not
participated in the first pilot test. This time, Avoidance reached an alpha of 0.6651
and Obliging 0.7239. In the final questionnaire, 16 instead of 15 questions were asked
in order to be able to delete question results if the replies were inconclusive and had
negative effect on the alpha values, so that data purification could be conducted.
Factor Analysis
A factor analysis conducted on the total number of questionnaires, revealed
three factors instead of the expected five:
47
Table 4: Factor analysis
Rotated Component Matrix Question Number Component
1 2 314I 0.729870443 1I 0.701714333 10C 0.690806134 2C 0.629477127 16O 0.591739531 6C 0.589480968 9A -0.46195726 0.441236738 15A 5O 0.794079821 7O 0.770298978 8I 0.551909879 13A 0.421827565 4O 11D 0.8168578743D 0.73983743612D 0.635086445Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis. Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.
Rotation converged in 5 iterations.
Question 9 (supposed to test Avoiding style) loaded across two factors, and
question 4 (Obliging) did not load in any factor. These questions were removed prior
to further data analysis. Also removed were questions 16 (Obliging) and 8
(Integrating), as they loaded in unexpected factors.
The three factors correspond to groups of CM styles:
Factor 1 = All questions belong to the Integrating and Compromising styles
Factor 2 = All questions belong to the Avoiding and Obliging styles
Factor 3 = All questions belong to the Dominating styles.
48
Therefore, the research suggested that we have found three factors or
constructs as opposed to five: Integrating/Compromising (IC), Avoiding/Obliging
(AO), and Dominating (D). Going back to Rahim's definitions of the styles, we see
that both Avoiding and Obliging require low concern for self, with Obliging being a
lose-win and Avoiding a lose-lose situation. "Self" is the loser in both cases.
Integrating and Compromising are the win-win and no-win/no-lose CM styles; in both
cases the Self and the other party in the conflict come out on the same level. Finally,
Dominating means that Self wins and the other party loses. The three factors therefore
describe the CM styles as follows:
IC: Both parties come out equal.
AO: The acting party (self) loses.
D: The acting party (self) wins.
Reliability of the Final Questionnaire
A measurement of how good these constructs are is Cronbach's alpha
(Cronbach 1951). As I am measuring the same construct with several questions,
reliability is given if the respondents reply to these different questions consistently.
The higher (closer to 1.0) the alpha is, the higher is the reliability.
The constructs are reliable with the following alphas:
Table 5: Reliability
Construct Mean Range alphaIC 4.9539 0.4717 0.7325AO 4.6496 0.9852 0.6564D 3.5886 0.7254 0.6114
49
These alpha values are academically acceptable; Elsayed-Ekhouly and Buda
(1996: 77) reach alphas of between 0.65 and 0.85 in their cross-cultural research on
conflict management using the ROCI-II survey instrument by Rahim. The other
popular conflict management survey instrument is the Thomas-Kilmann form, which
had Cronbach's alpha values of between 0.43 and 0.71 (Thomas & Kilmann, 1978).
In this chapter, conceptual framework was explained and shown how it led to
the research design. The hypotheses and population and sample were introduced and
explained, as well the design and testing of the questionnaire. In the next chapter, the
data found will be analysed and the hypotheses tested.
Chapter 4
Data Analysis
In this chapter, findings of the analyses will be shown. These have been used
to test the hypotheses and accept or reject them.
Hypothesis Testing
In this chapter, Avoidance has been replaced with the AO (Avoiding /
Obliging) construct, and Integrating with the IC (Integrating / Compromising)
construct.
Hypothesis 1: Avoidance is the preferred conflict management style in truly
Thai companies.
Table 6: Preferred conflict management styles in Thai companies.
N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error
IC 230 4.9283 .71727 .04730
AO 228 4.6612 .67324 .04459
D 221 3.5641 .93070 .06261
51
These figures clearly show that IC is the preferred CM style, followed
relatively closely but distinct by AO. D is far below those values.
Hypothesis 1: Rejected.
Result: The preferred CM style in Thai companies is IC.
Hypothesis 2: Conflict management styles in Thai branch offices of
multinational companies, headed by an expatriate manager, show a shift of preferred
styles from Avoiding towards Integrating.
Table 7: Preferred conflict management styles in European multinationals.
N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error
IC 177 4.9873 .60904 .04578
AO 178 4.6348 .61703 .04625
D 176 3.6193 .83169 .06269
The mean for the IC construct is with 4.9873 higher than the mean for AO, so
IC is the construct preferred by employee of a multinational company. However, the
mean is with 4.9873 only slightly higher than that of the Thai companies', and due to
the standard deviation of 0.60904 for the MNCs and even 0.71727 for the Thai
companies, couple with the standard error, this difference between Thai and MNC is
not very big.
52
The mean for AO is 0.0264 points below that of Thai companies, but with a
standard deviation of over 0.6 for each group of companies, and a standard error over
0.04, this difference between Thai and multinational companies is insignificant.
Comparing Thai companies with European multinationals, the following F-
statistics and significances result:
Table 8: ANOVA between groups, Thai vs. MNC
Construct F-Stat. Significance
IC 0.771 0.380
AO 0.165 0.685
D 0.379 0.539
The significance is so low that it can be concluded that the preferred conflict
management style is not determined by the company's home country.
Hypothesis 2: Rejected.
Result: Preferred conflict management styles in multinational companies do
not show a shift towards the IC construct.
Hypothesis 3: The home country effect on preferred conflict management
styles within MNC's Thai branches decreases with increasing distance from top
management level.
53
As has already been shown above, a home country effect could not be proven.
However, it is interesting to investigate whether the preferred conflict management
construct depends on the organisation level.
Since n=2 for Top Management for all Thai companies surveyed, and also for
all MNCs surveyed, only 4 organisational levels have been analysed, namely middle
management, lower management, clerical staff, non-clerical staff.
Table 9: ANOVA of conflict management styles by organisational level in Thai companies.
Descriptives
N Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error 95% Confidence Interval
for Mean
Minimum Maximum
Lower Bound Upper Bound
AO Top Management 2 5.0000 0.00000 0.00000 5.0000 5.0000 5.00 5.00
Middle Management 44 4.5795 0.56232 0.08477 4.4086 4.7505 2.75 5.50
Lower Management 39 4.5321 0.71216 0.11404 4.3012 4.7629 2.50 5.75
Clerical Staff 120 4.7000 0.70904 0.06473 4.5718 4.8282 3.00 6.00
Non-clerical Staff 23 4.8043 0.61679 0.12861 4.5376 5.0711 3.25 5.75
Total 228 4.6612 0.67324 0.04459 4.5733 4.7490 2.50 6.00
IC Top Management 2 5.0000 0.35355 0.25000 1.8234 8.1766 4.75 5.25
Middle Management 44 4.9432 0.74487 0.11229 4.7167 5.1696 2.75 6.00
Lower Management 40 4.8313 0.75614 0.11956 4.5894 5.0731 3.25 6.00
Clerical Staff 121 4.9545 0.70931 0.06448 4.8269 5.0822 2.75 6.00
Non-clerical Staff 23 4.9239 0.69672 0.14528 4.6226 5.2252 3.75 6.00
Total 230 4.9283 0.71727 0.04730 4.8351 5.0215 2.75 6.00
D Top Management 2 2.5000 0.70711 0.50000 -3.8531 8.8531 2.00 3.00
Middle Management 43 3.5659 1.06293 0.16209 3.2388 3.8930 1.00 5.33
Lower Management 39 3.6239 0.83484 0.13368 3.3533 3.8946 1.00 5.33
Clerical Staff 116 3.5603 0.94342 0.08759 3.3868 3.7339 1.00 5.67
Non-clerical Staff 21 3.5714 0.75383 0.16450 3.2283 3.9146 2.00 5.00
Total 221 3.5641 0.93070 0.06261 3.4407 3.6875 1.00 5.67
Table 10: F-statistic and significance for CM styles by organisational level in Thai companies Construct F-stat. Significance AO 1.225 0.302 IC 1.086 0.365 D 2.125 0.080
These figures show that the organisational level has no impact on the preferred
conflict management style in Thai companies.
54
Table 11: ANOVA of conflict management styles by organisational level in Thai branches of multinational companies.
Descriptives
N Mean Std.
Deviation
Std. Error 95% Confidence Interval
for Mean
Minimum Maximum
Lower Bound Upper Bound
AO Top Management 2 4.5000 0.35355 0.25000 1.3234 7.6766 4.25 4.75
Middle Management 27 4.4444 0.65167 0.12541 4.1867 4.7022 3.50 6.00
Lower Management 37 4.6216 0.61976 0.10189 4.4150 4.8283 3.00 6.00
Clerical Staff 96 4.7161 0.59230 0.06045 4.5961 4.8362 3.00 6.00
Non-clerical Staff 15 4.5167 0.71631 0.18495 4.1200 4.9133 3.00 5.50
Total 177 4.6356 0.61870 0.04650 4.5438 4.7274 3.00 6.00
IC Top Management 2 5.6250 0.53033 0.37500 0.8602 10.3898 5.25 6.00
Middle Management 27 5.0370 0.60329 0.11610 4.7984 5.2757 4.00 6.00
Lower Management 38 4.9934 0.54366 0.08819 4.8147 5.1721 3.75 6.00
Clerical Staff 94 4.9867 0.56484 0.05826 4.8710 5.1024 3.75 6.00
Non-clerical Staff 15 4.7667 0.96578 0.24936 4.2318 5.3015 2.50 6.00
Total 176 4.9844 0.60954 0.04595 4.8937 5.0751 2.50 6.00
D Top Management 2 4.1667 0.70711 0.50000 -2.1864 10.5198 3.67 4.67
Middle Management 27 3.5185 0.63605 0.12241 3.2669 3.7701 2.00 4.67
Lower Management 37 3.9369 0.71508 0.11756 3.6985 4.1754 2.33 5.33
Clerical Staff 94 3.5106 0.88354 0.09113 3.3297 3.6916 1.33 5.67
Non-clerical Staff 15 3.5778 0.95508 0.24660 3.0489 4.1067 1.00 5.00
Total 175 3.6152 0.83231 0.06292 3.4911 3.7394 1.00 5.67
Table 12: F-statistic and significance for CM styles by organisational level in Thai branches of multinational companies. Construct F-stat. Significance AO 1.225 0.302 IC 1.086 0.365 D 2.125 0.080 Also in Thai branches of multinational companies, the organisational level has
no significant impact on the preferred conflict management style.
It can therefore be seen that there is no significant relationship between the
organisational level and the preferred CM style at all. The question whether the
influence of the home country is constant has to be answered affirmatively, as the
influence is zero on all levels. The same holds true for Thai and multinational
companies, so it can be concluded:
55
Hypothesis 3: Rejected.
Result: No decreasing home country effect could be found. CM styles do not
depend on organisational level.
Hypothesis 4: The higher Thai people are educated, the more perceptible is a
shift in preferences of conflict management styles from Avoidance towards
Integrating.
Since it has already been established that the preferred conflict management
style does not depend on the companies' home country, this hypothesis was tested
across all educational levels within the samples. The distribution of highest education
among the sample was as follows:
Table 13: Education of the total sample in percent
EDUCTTL Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent Valid Some Highschool 9 2.2 2.3 2.3 Highschool Thai 40 9.8 10.0 12.3 Highschool Intl 2 0.5 0.5 12.8 Bachelor Thai 266 64.9 66.5 79.3 Bachelor Intl 24 5.9 6.0 85.3 Bachelor Abroad 4 1.0 1.0 86.3 Master Thai 30 7.3 7.5 93.8 Master Intl 15 3.7 3.8 97.5 Master Abroad 10 2.4 2.5 100.0 Total 400 97.6 100.0Missing System 10 2.4Total 410 100.0
56
Figure 7: Distribution of education across the sample.
Evaluating how this compares to the Thai population in general, we find that
nation-wide there were 14,219,382 students in 2002. Out of these, 1,423,823 (10%)
were studying in higher education, 1,286,245 (9%) were studying for a Bachelor's
degree or lower. 126,753 (0.89% of all students) (NSO, 2004). However, the figures
may be quite different when looking at Bangkok only; in addition, there are no
statistics of the education of the Thai work force, neither nation-wide nor specifically
in Bangkok. It is an interesting future research to measure the percentage of each
educational level among the Bangkok work force.
Looking at the preferred conflict management style or construct in the sample,
the following result can be found for IC:
57
Figure 8: IC by education
As the education at Some Highschool, Highschool Intl and Bachelor Abroad
are single-digit, these educational levels have been ignored in further analyses. The
trend shows that the IC construct gets higher scores with increasing education.
ANOVA reveals a Mean of 4.9013 for Highschool Thai and 5.1250 for Master
Abroad.
Trend
58
Figure 9: AO by education
Ignoring the three values with the low n, the trend here shows that the AO
construct becomes less popular with increasing education.
Trend
59
Figure 10: D by education
This graph shows that the trend for D (dominating) as the preferred conflict
management style increases with education. However, the absolute value (mean) for
D is 3.5886, while for AO it is 4.6496 and for IC 4.9539. So IC remains the preferred
conflict management style.
Hypothesis 4: Accepted.
Result: While the preferred conflict management style by all subjects is IC and
with only a marginal increase with increasing education, AO and D show more
noticeable dependence on education.
The next chapter will discuss these results and their meaning, and suggest
future research.
Chapter 5
Discussion and Conclusion
This chapter discusses the findings and reach conclusions. It also points to
possible future research.
The Result
Thailand on the one hand and certain European countries, such as Germany,
France, or the UK on the other hand have very different cultures when measured
along Hofstede's cultural dimensions. This means that they do not necessarily share
the same values, and therefore tend to manage conflict differently. A high
Individuality Index is often associated with Integrating, a low Individuality Index, i.e.
a high Collectivism, with Avoidance.
This led to the hypotheses describing that foreign companies in Thailand
which are headed by a foreigner from the same country, has such an impact on the
preferred conflict management style in that company, that it is distinct from a Thai
company.
This research could not show that in European MNCs in Bangkok the
preferred conflict management style is different from that in Thai companies in the
same industry. This is somewhat surprising, as Hofstede (1993) showed that the
values adopted by people at an early age have an impact on the corporate culture.
61
Hofstede's research was done within the same company's branch offices all over the
world in order to guarantee that the corporate culture will not influence his research
on cultural dimensions. Value systems are part of the corporate culture, and if the
managers of the foreign multinational companies in Thailand grew up in the
companies' respective home countries, an impact should have been measurable.
It is very interesting that this is not what could be found. It appears that either
all companies have the same values so that there are some generic values in the
industry, or the cultural dimensions and values in Bangkok are not that different from
those in Western European countries any more. Have the cultural dimensions and
values in Thailand changed? Or only in Bangkok? It would be worth exploring the
cultural dimensions in Bangkok and in provincial areas of Thailand so many years
after Hofstede did it, and so many years after modern development has led the city to
become a true metropolis.
One aspect of development, according to the Human Development Reports of
the UNDP (2004), is education. This research seems to indicate that the preferred
conflict management style is correlated to education. Does this mean that education
undermines the values of a collectivist society? Is education the main independent
variable, and not the home country of a company?
Comparison of Theories and Findings
As indicated in the introduction, it is unclear from the literature whether the
home country of a multinational company has a significant impact on the conflict
62
management styles preferred in their branches abroad, located in a country with a
different culture. The cultural dimension looked at in this study is mainly
Individualism/Collectivism, but also Power Distance. A high Individualism Index is
often associated with an Integrating conflict management style, while a high
Collectivism Index with Avoiding. That the preferred conflict management styles in
Thai companies and European MNCs in Thailand do not differ, may indicate that the
cultural dimensions in Thailand have shifted. The impressive development that
Thailand has achieved in the past few decades may have shifted the preferred conflict
management style, at least in large companies in Bangkok. Kozan and Ergin (1999)
described a "Westernization" of Turkish managers' and non-managers' preferred CM
styles in Ankara, compared to their counterparts other cities.
If development means Westernisation, Bangkok may be a city that is being
"Westernised". Values such as efficiency, on-time performance, productivity and
economic viability are being introduced. Also, as part of the development efforts of
the government, the general education is increasing. Almost three quarters of the
sample taken in this random industry have a Bachelor's degree, and this study also
suggests that the preferred conflict management style may depend on the education.
Kanter (1994) found that conflicts are often triggered by contextual factors
rather than national cultures, and Jagadish (2003) went as far as calling cultural
differences a myth. This research recognises cultural differences, and does not
question Hofstede's theories; but the cultural dimensions in Bangkok seem to have
shifted in the time since his research.
63
Implications for Businesses
If Thailand is shifting - or may have shifted already, at least in Bangkok - from
a conflict-avoiding collectivist society to a society that prefers managing conflicts by
integrating and compromising, styles in which the partners are equal, international
companies will be more willing to invest and open branch offices in Thailand.
Conflicts always arise when people work together, and an open approach allowing
both parties to express their ideas or feelings, and ensuring that they will also listen to
the other parties' concerns, will be much easier for Western (in this example,
European) expatriates to handle.
Not only is the result of this research goods news for multinationals who
consider investing in Thailand. It is also goods news for Thai companies, if we
assume to an open approach to conflict management within the company leads to
higher efficiency and therefore increased competitiveness. The Modern Trade
industry is a highly competitive industry and Thai companies have proven that they
can compete with foreign multinationals. Education and preferred conflict
management styles may be playing important roles.
Limitation / Scope of the Research
This research is restricted to the preferred conflict management styles in the
working environment of the companies in the Modern Trade Industry in Bangkok that
have been surveyed. In other environments, for example at home, or in small family-
owned businesses with no formal structures, or in government offices, the people
64
surveyed may or may not prefer conflict management styles different from those
preferred in the working environment.
Also the use of convenience sampling means that the results of this study are
not generalisable. Convenience sampling, like all non-probability sampling, is often
used in exploratory research and can give indications into which direction further
research could be done. This is the purpose of this study.
Convenience sampling also means that the responses don't follow a normal
distribution. Since ANOVA assumes normal distribution, the findings are to be read
with caution. However, since the research conducted in this study is a first of its kind
in Thailand, indications were sought so as to set a direction for future research.
Future Research
There may be various reasons for the results found, and it opens a list of
possible future research:
1.) The cultural dimensions were measured a long time ago, before Thailand
started serious development. The government's goal for this year (2004) is
to become part of the First World (Jatusripitak, 2003). This means that
many changes have taken place, including societal and cultural changes.
Future research question: Are the values for the five cultural dimensions
Hofstede found many years ago still valid today, or have they changed?
65
2.) When travelling from Bangkok to remote provinces, the original Thai
values appear to be much more preserved. So, the result may have been
different if the research had taken place in the provinces rather than in the
capital city, which houses over 10 million inhabitants.
Future research question: Do we arrive the same findings if the research is
conducted on upcountry branches of the Thai and multinational companies
surveyed?
3.) The Modern Trade retail business is a rather new modern business. It may
be inherent in the industry that efficiency, corporate communication, and
co-operation across organisational levels - i.e. modern management
techniques - are required in this industry in order to be able to compete.
Future research question: If conducted in another, older, industry, for
example hospitality, will the result still be that there is no difference
between Thai and foreign companies?
4.) It is possible that the staff turnover in these companies is so great,
relatively speaking, that employees work at a foreign company for a
couple of years, then work for a Thai company, and so on. That means that
the staff themselves experience a mixture of CM styles which in the end
lead to a common preference, "the way it is done" in this particular
industry.
66
Future research question: How high is the staff turnover in this particular
industry, and how does that compare to other industries?
5.) With regards to the education, it appears that the IC construct receives a
relatively equal score across the different educational levels, while AO and
D decrease and increase respectively with increasing education.
Future research question: Comparing geographical areas in Thailand with
higher and lower education, will there be shifts in the preferred conflict
management style?
This research thesis has revealed some interesting aspects of conflict
management styles in Bangkok. New questions have arisen, and Thailand, with its
dynamic society and fast development, offers a nourishing soil for further research in
this academic field.
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APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
THE MODERN TRADE INDUSTRY
The Modern Trade Industry
Modern Trade is part of the retail industry. The modern trade store concept
includes department stores, discount stores or hypermarkets, convenience stores,
specialty and category killer stores, and supermarkets (Phupoksakul, 2003). Retail
stores not included in Modern Trade are for example Mom & Pop stores as well as
wet and dry markets.
In 2002, the Thai Modern Trade industry consisted of the following companies
(Ibid.):
Department Stores: Central Department Store, Robinson Department Store, The Mall Department Store, Siam Jusco Department Store, Tang Hua Seng, Pata Department Store, Others. Total 108 outlets.
Discount Stores/Hypermarkets: Tesco Lotus Supercenter, Big C Supercenter, Makro Supercenter, Carrefour. Total 112 outlets.
Convenience Stores: 7-11, V-Shop, Family Mart, Fresh Mart, Rak Bann Kerd (Formerly AM/PM). Total 2,814 outlets.
Gas Station Convenience Stores (G-Stores): Tiger Mart - Exxon, Star Mart - Caltex, Jiffy - Conoco, Select - Shell Oil, Lemon Green - Bangchak Petroleum, Bai Chak - Bangchak Petroleum. Total 758 outlets.
Specialty Stores: Boots, Watson's, Marks & Spencer. Total 146 outlets.
Category Killer Stores: Power Buy (electronic white goods), Super Sports (sporting goods), Home Pro (home accessories & DIY), Office Makro Center (stationery), Office Depot (stationery). Total 93 outlets.
Supermarkets: Top's Supermarket, Food Lion Supermarket, Foodland Super Center, Villa Market. Total 100 outlets.
APPENDIX B
INFORMATION ABOUT THAILAND
Information about Thailand
Thailand is a country about the size of France, located in Southeast Asia. It is
ruled by a constitutional monarchy; head of state is the highly revered King Bumiphol
Adulyadech (Rama IX), the longest-reigning monarch in the world. Head of
government is the prime minister, and the legislation is made by a democratically
elected bicameral parliament. Thailand has a population of over 64 million people,
95% of who are Buddhists, followed by Muslims with 3.8% (CIA, 2004). Thailand is
the only country in Southeast Asia that has never been colonised (Ibid.), which
allowed Thai values to prosper and not be diluted by colonialists' values.
Thailand is a developing country with stable growth rates over the last decades
(except during the Asian crisis which started in 1997). The growth rate in the year
2000 was an impressive 4.4%. Inflation is low (1.6% in 2001) and the currency (Thai
Baht) is freely convertible and relatively stable. Thailand is the biggest rice exporter
in the world (FAO, 2004). Apart from rice, the tourism industry is an important
foreign-currency earner.
Thailand is known throughout the world as a beautiful country (temples,
beaches, waterfalls, to name just a few attractions) populated by warm-hearted people
who offer genuine hospitality (the "Land of Smiles"), increasingly popular (in the
West) local food, and a very low rate of street crime.
BIOGRAPHY
Mr. Thomas E. Fernandez-Freercks was born on 08. January 1963 in
Hamburg/Germany. He studied physics at the University of Hamburg and later went
into the field of freight forwarding and logistics. He received his Degree in Freight
Forwarding (Speditionskaufmann) in 1984 and has been in management since 1989.
In 1990, he moved to Thailand and has since collected experience in cross-cultural
management in his professional field. His working experience in the Far East also
includes three years in Taiwan. He has been working for German and Thai freight
forwarding and logistics companies and is currently employed in the position of
Overseas Manager by East-West Air Services, a leading Thai company in this field.
He also carries degrees in the English and Thai languages as well as a
postgraduate diploma in Computing for Commerce and Industry from the Open
University in the UK.
