This page provides a summary of the key ideas within Bryan's latest book "Cultural differences and improving performance".

You can order copies of this book from Gower Publishing.

The idea of 'performance engineering' gives us a way to look at how people's performance in their jobs can vary. The work of Tom Gilbert and Robert Mager and Peter Pipe proposed that there were essentially three factors influencing the quality of people's work:

• Information, about how to do the job and how well they were performing it.
• Equipment, whether the equipment (using the term in a very broad sense to cover machinery, infrastructure and practical arrangements, etc) is both appropriate for carrying out the task and that the people are willing and able to use the equipment in the way intended.
• Desire, the combination of motivation (how much the worker wants to carry out the task correctly) and incentives, what the employer offers as a reward and any intrinsic satisfaction from completing the task.

Management texts almost always start from a common set of assumptions about all of these factors. For example:

• Everyone likes to have information provided in the same way.
• Ways of giving feedback to workers is always the same.
• Everyone approaches a piece of equipment with the same mental model about how it operates.
• Everyone is motivated by the same factors, such as promotion, financial rewards, and so on.

We have these common assumptions because the great majority of management thinking and writing has come out of north America, and to a lesser extent, western Europe, and it has been overlooked that such thinking is based on a raft of beliefs and values so integral to those cultures that they are assumed to be 'human nature'.

The reality is that they are not. Beliefs and values vary hugely around the world, so thinking that management practices that work in New York or London with 'white Anglo-Saxon' staff will be equally effective with local staff in Beijing or Rio de Janeiro is highly questionable.

We therefore need to look to the work of cross-cultural psychologists, such as Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars and Richard Lewis. These writers have proposed various 'cultural dimensions' that enable us to consider how different cultures approach aspects of working life in different ways. These dimensions include:

• attitudes to hierarchy, so while in western cultures we favour flat management structures and consultative management styles, in other cultures people want there to be a clear and rigid hierarchies of decision-making and order giving
• feelings about uncertainty, so that some people appreciate uncertainty, because it allows them to carry out tasks in the way they find easiest, giving them job satisfaction, whereas in other parts of the world people prefer things to be clearly defined, and a lack of clarity can cause great distress
• relative importance given to individual or group activities, so in individualist societies people like to be rewarded for individual, personal contributions, whereas in group-oriented, or collectivist cultures, people want rewards to be given to the working group, and singling out individuals can cause a great deal of difficulty.

"Cultural differences and improving performance" weaves these two strands of performance engineering and cross-cultural psychology together to show how managers faced with performance problems in culturally diverse settings can come to understand the problems and potential solutions.

The third strand of the book provides a seven step process for solving a problem, starting from defining the problem through analysing it, identifying and selecting solutions and implementing and evaluating them, all the time retaining a multicultural perspective, to avoid ending up with solutions that reflect one particular perspective.

This is truly a unique book that should find its way on to the bookshelves of every manager working in international or other culturally diverse settings.