The Cultural Clash Between Putzmeister From Germany And...

When using Hofstede, it becomes apparent that the two cultures differ regarding individualism, uncertainty avoidance and power distance. The scores indicate that Germans are individualistic and ambitious. They also want to control the future and they prefer egalitarian structures. Contrarily, the Chinese have a comparable profile, except, they are group-oriented, they accept an unpredictable future and they prefer hierarchies ((Germany in comparison with China, n.d.). These differences indicate a potential cultural clash between Putzmeister from Germany and Sany from China. For example, Germans might want to plan future business actions while the Chinese would not understand this behaviour because to them the future is uncontrollable.†¦show more content†¦Another example are the opposing values of equality and respect for authority which mirror the different degrees of power distance mentioned earlier. German subordinates would speak up if they can contribute expertise to a discussion. For the Chinese, this would be unthinkable since they highly respect their superiors. These and other behaviours are the reason why Putzmeister can be classified as a role or Eiffel tower culture and Sany as a power or family culture (Harrison, 1972; Trompenaars, 2011). This categorization is illustrated below This illustration displays the immense cultural distance between the two companies (Liu Chen, 2015) and the potential for a cultural clash, just like the national cultures. This distance seems to be the reason why Sany tried to preserve the cultures of both firms (Copley, 2016) and limit the cultural integration to strategic cooperation (Klooß, 2013). This approach is aligned with academia suggesting that it is vital for successful Chinese-European MA’s to keep the European subsidiary intact to preserve motivation (Chen, Werle, Moser, 2016). Indeed, the acquisition of Putzmeister by Sany shows that cultural distance can be a chance (Liu Chen, 2015) and this might have made this partnership a success (Copley, 2016). 4.0 Question 4 As discussed in section two, cross-border acquisitions like Sany’s can be subject to currency risk. To determine