International Business and Cultural Diversity Essay - 1

International Business and Cultural Diversity - Essay Example In the modern, contemporary society, one of the most overused terms is culture (Samovar, Porter and McDaniel 2012). According to Schein 2010, culture can be divided into four broad categories. These are macro cultures, subcultures, organizational cultures and micro-cultures (Bosshardt 2006). Culture is a dynamic phenomenon and a basic background structure that has the effect of influencing us in a wide variety of ways. It is constantly changing and reenacted by our constant interactions with other people and is progressively shaped by our own behavior. The main connection between culture and leadership can clearly be seen in microcultures and organizational cultures where the culture in such systems is usually thought of as the end result of the embedding that an organization’s founder or leader within the group has imposed upon it and it with positive results (Schein, 2010). Culture can also be broadly defined as a set of shared values like beliefs, norms, behaviors, attitudes, material objects and symbolic resources. Basically speaking it can be thought of as the basic rules for functioning and living within a given society (Samovar, Porter and McDaniel 2012). Variables can broadly be defined as items that we can control, measure or even manipulate while performing research. They are viewed as characteristics that have the potential of having more than one value or score. They can be viewed as being relatively straightforward for instance when we consider variables such as income or age while sometimes they can be viewed as being relatively abstract such as when we are considering items such as a degree of prejudice or even social class (Inglehart and Welzel 2007). Researchers constantly analyze variables in order to determine how they end up influencing each other.Social variables can be viewed as logical sets of attributes. An attribute of a person is either male or female will have the main variable of gender or sex (Weinstein 2005).