Scandinavian management style in Hong Kong

Abstract: In all aspects of life culture has a deep impact on how we react and relate to different situations. In understanding the meaning of culture it is vital to distinguish between national culture and corporate culture. National culture can be found in all different human interactions and organizations, whereas corporate culture can be related to the environment within business organizations. We believe that there are a number of collusions when a manager from one culture interacts with persons living in a totally different one. The purpose of this dissertation was to find out how Scandinavian management style practiced in Hong Kong, would be affected by the Chinese culture. To understand if or in which ways the Scandinavian management style had been affected, we studied some existing theories and tested them to the reality. To make this possible we concluded the main contents from the theories, in total six hypotheses, which we later used as a foundation to our questionnaire. The result of the questionnaire indicated that most of our hypotheses were accepted, however, due to the low answer frequency, we felt that the result from the questionnaire needed some complementation. In addition to this, we decided to take the research one step further, through semi-structured interviews. Thereafter, we compared the results from our questionnaire to the results from our semi-structured interviews and made a comparison to the hypothesis. The outcome of this comparison became the final conclusion of our dissertation, which indicated that the Scandinavian managers would adapt their management style to a certain degree to the Chinese culture.