ment philosophy can be transferred from one environment to another with little or no modification; the idea of universality is that some management concepts can be universally applied regardless of the environment in which they operate. Thus management by objectives can be held to be highly transferable, and some of the management ideas borrowed from the behavioral sciences can be held to be universal (Koontz, 1969, p. 423).
Although universality and transferability gained popular acceptance during the 1960s and 1970s, recent developments suggest that management is highly dependent on the culture in which it is applied, and managers of international organizations, particularly those associated with multinational corporations, must be aware of cultural differences. Where an American manager might assume that all employees have a strong drive to be on time to work and to meetings, this expectation is likely to fall short when the manager confronts employees in Asia (Hinkleman, 1994, p.รก42). If the manager does not recognize that there are cultural differences which can account for the different way in which two individuals from the East and the West view time, inappropriate action might be taken. Even when managerial action (either discipline or reward) is appropriate, the type of action which is taken can vary greatly from country to country, and managers who simply transfer their actions from the United States may well receive very different responses from those they were trying to elicit in a different country (Khan, 1989, p. 7).
Despite the caution that managers should have when approaching employees and co-workers from or in a different culture, the concepts of universality and transferability can be applied to some degree; certainly the issue of comparative management has significance to managers in the international arena. The world has essentially become smaller in recent years as advances in transportation and telecom...