Alfonsus (Fons) Trompenaars (born 1953, Amsterdam) [1] [2] is a Dutch organizational theorist, management consultant, and author in the field of ethics. [3] known for the development of Trompenaars' model of national culture differences [4] and Dilemma Theory.
In 1979, Trompenaars received his MA in economics at the Vrije Universiteit and in 1983 his PhD from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for the thesis The Organization of Meaning and the Meaning of Organization.
In 1981 Trompenaars started his career at the Royal Dutch Shell Personnel Division, working on job classification and management development. In 1989 together with Charles Hampden-Turner he founded and directed the consultancy firm Centre for International Business Studies, working for such companies as BP, Philips, IBM, Heineken, AMD, Mars, Motorola, General Motors, Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, ABN AMRO, ING, PepsiCo, Honeywell. In 1998 the company was bought by KPMG and renamed Trompenaars Hampden-Turner. [5]
Trompenaars was awarded the International Professional Practice Area Research Award by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) in 1991. Subsequently, in 1999 Business magazine ranked him as one of the top 5 management consultants next to Michael Porter, Tom Peters and Edward de Bono. [6] In 2011, he was voted one of the top 20 HR Most Influential International Thinkers by HR Magazine. In 2015, he was once again ranked in the Thinkers50 of the most influential management thinkers alive and in 2017 inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame. [7] Fons is the recipient of the George Petitpas Award 2023. [8] The AHRI Cross Cultural Management Award, is supported by Fons Trompenaars, acknowledging excellence in fostering cross-cultural inclusion and implementing effective management strategies.
Trompenaars wrote Riding the Waves of Culture, Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business. This book (in its third edition) sold over 120,000 copies and was translated into 16 languages amongst them, French, German, Dutch, Korean, Danish, Turkish, Chinese, Hungarian and Portuguese. He is co-author amongst others of Nine Visions of Capitalism: Unlocking the Meanings of Wealth Creation and Rewarding Performance Globally.
Positions - Co-director at the Servant-Leadership Centre for Research and Education (SERVUS) at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. - Member of Advisory Board Webster University Leiden. - Distinguished Advisor of Centre for TransCultural Studies at Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore. - International Director at the International Society for Organisational Development. - Faculty member at the Global Institute for Leadership Development (GILD). - Judge of the Fons Trompenaars award for Cross Cultural Management (AHRI).
Trompenaars' model of national culture differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication applied to general business and management, developed by Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. [9] [4] This model of national culture differences has seven dimensions.
There are five orientations covering the ways in which human beings deal with each other.
Source: [10]
Dilemma theory, as proposed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, is a framework for understanding and managing cultural differences in organizations. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner suggest that cultural diversity often leads to dilemmas or tensions between conflicting cultural values. These dilemmas can arise in various areas such as communication, decision-making, leadership, and teamwork.
The key premise of dilemma theory is that these cultural dilemmas are not problems to be solved but rather paradoxes to be managed. Instead of trying to eliminate one side of the dilemma in favor of the other, individuals and organizations must learn to navigate the tensions between conflicting values.
Books, a selection:
Articles, a selection:
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study investigating how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.
Gerard Hendrik (Geert) Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist, IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations.
The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The literal translation of the Dutch name Vrije Universiteit is "Free University". "Free" refers to independence of the university from both the State and the Dutch Reformed Church. Both within and outside the university, the institution is commonly referred to as "the VU". Although founded as a private institution, the VU has received government funding on a parity basis with public universities since 1970. The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern Buitenveldert neighbourhood of Amsterdam and adjacent to the modern Zuidas business district.
Charles Hampden-Turner is a British management philosopher, and Senior Research Associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 1990. He is the creator of Dilemma Theory and co-founder and Director of Research and Development at the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group, in Amsterdam.
In cross-cultural psychology, uncertainty avoidance is how cultures differ on the amount of tolerance they have of unpredictability. Uncertainty avoidance is one of five key qualities or dimensions measured by the researchers who developed the Hofstede model of cultural dimensions to quantify cultural differences across international lines and better understand why some ideas and business practices work better in some countries than in others.According to Geert Hofstede, "The fundamental issue here is how a society deals with the fact that the future can never be known: Should we try to control it or just let it happen?"
Power distance is the unequal distribution of power between parties, and the level of acceptance of that inequality; whether it is in the family, workplace, or other organizations.
Nirmalya Kumar is Professor of Marketing of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University. He has served on the Boards of ACC Limited, Ambuja Cements, Bata India, BP Ergo, Defaqto, Tata Capital, Tata Chemicals, Tata Industries, Tata Limited (UK), Tata Unistore, Ultratech, and Zensar Technologies. He received the 2021 Mahajan Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Strategy by the Marketing Strategy SIG of the American Marketing Association (AMA).
Rita Gunther McGrath is an American strategic management scholar and professor of management at the Columbia Business School. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning.
Cultural sensitivity, also referred to as cross-cultural sensitivity or cultural awareness, is the knowledge, awareness, and acceptance of other cultures and others' cultural identities. It is related to cultural competence, and is sometimes regarded as the precursor to the achievement of cultural competence, but is a more commonly used term. On the individual level, cultural sensitivity is a state of mind regarding interactions with those different from oneself. Cultural sensitivity enables travelers, workers, and others to successfully navigate interactions with a culture other than their own.
Subir Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-American author of 15 books and noted for his work in quality and management. He is currently the chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group, LLC, in Bingham Farms, Michigan.
Third culture kids (TCK) or third culture individuals (TCI) are people who were raised in a culture other than their parents' or the culture of their country of nationality, and also live in a different environment during a significant part of their child development years. They typically are exposed to a greater volume and variety of cultural influences than those who grow up in one particular cultural setting. The term applies to both adults and children, as the term kid refers to the individual's formative or developmental years. However, for clarification, sometimes the term adult third culture kid (ATCK) is used.
The double-swing model is a model of intercultural communication, originated by Muneo Yoshikawa, conceptualizing how individuals, cultures, and intercultural notions can meet in constructive ways. The communication is understood as an infinite process where both parties change in the course of the communicative or translational exchange.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a framework for cross-cultural psychology, developed by Geert Hofstede. It shows the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behavior, using a structure derived from factor analysis.
Global leadership is the interdisciplinary study of the key elements that future leaders in all realms of the personal experience should acquire to effectively familiarize themselves with the psychological, physiological, geographical, geopolitical, anthropological and sociological effects of globalization. Global leadership occurs when an individual or individuals navigate collaborative efforts of different stakeholders through environmental complexity towards a vision by leveraging a global mindset. Today, global leaders must be capable of connecting "people across countries and engage them to global team collaboration in order to facilitate complex processes of knowledge sharing across the globe" Personality characteristics, as well as a cross-cultural experience, appear to influence effectiveness in global leaders.
A Yakult lady, also known as an Yakult auntie, is a woman who sells Yakult products as an employee or delivers the products door to door to individuals at their homes. In order to promote good health, they sell and market Yakult products while riding bicycles, motorcycles, or other automobiles. They wear the company's uniform, including a hat and a pair of gloves. Men such as Kazuhisa Ishii have also worked as Yakult "ladies". The Yakult lady home delivery system was introduced in 1963 while the Yakult Lady System started in 1981.
Trompenaars's model of national culture differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication applied to general business and management, developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. This involved a large-scale survey of 8,841 managers and organization employees from 43 countries.
Erin Meyer is an American author and professor at INSEAD Business School, based in Fontainebleau, France. She is most known for writing the 2014 book, The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business a study that analyzes how national cultural differences impact business. She is also known for co-authoring the book with Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, which became a New York Times best seller in October 2020.
A cusper is a person born near the end of one generation and the beginning of another. People born in these circumstances tend to have a mix of characteristics common to their adjacent generations, but do not closely resemble those born in the middle of their adjacent generations, and thus these cusper groups can be considered micro generations. Generational profiles are built based on people born in the middle of a generation rather than those on the tails of a generation. Generations may overlap by five to eight years. As such, many people identify with aspects of at least two generations. The precise birth years defining when generations start and end vary. Lancaster and Stillman (2002) introduced the term, cusper, in reference to those who are born at either end of a generation, and consequently, may identified to some extent with the generation before or after it. The authors observed that such individuals can often play an important role in mediating dialogue between members of different generations. Other authors like Ubl, Walden and Arbit (2017) observed something similar: "the truth is that they play a pivotal role in ensuring seamless communication across generations. Cuspers are natural translators because they often speak the language of two generations. Sometimes we even call them generationally bilingual!"
Amy C. Edmondson is an American scholar of leadership, teaming, and organizational learning. She is currently Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. Edmondson is the author of seven books and more than 75 articles and case studies. She is best known for her pioneering work on psychological safety, which has helped spawn a large body of academic research in management, healthcare and education over the past 15 years. Her books include "Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well", “The Fearless Organization,Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth” (2018)) and “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy” (2012).
Soren Marcus Kaplan is an author, consultant, and speaker on the subject of innovation and innovation culture in organizations. He is an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, founder of the consulting firm InnovationPoint, co-founder of the software company Praxie.com, and is a columnist for the Innovate column of Inc. Magazine.
