Dutch academic insists culture is the key to success in outsourcing

Trying to change national cultures is a sure-fire way to fail with an HR outsourcing project, a leading Dutch academic has insisted.

The keynote speaker at the HRO World Europe Conference, professor Geert Hofstede of Maastricht University in The Netherlands, said that people’s emotions were tied to the place they were born and could not be altered.

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“Research shows that while corporate cultures are rooted in conscious practices, national cultures come from unconscious values and should be given as facts for managers,” he told delegates.

“Managing corporate culture is a key task for management. Transformation succeeds better where corporate culture is results- rather than process-orientated, and open rather than closed,” he said.