Interethnic Culture Orientation of Business Managers in Pakistan

Abstract

Culture plays an important role in determining the approach to handle business matters, way of dealing and meetings with subordinates and colleagues and other business communications and decisions. Therefore it is important and worthy to explore the interethnic culture orientation of business managers in any multicultural society such as Pakistan. Pakistan is a blend of several ethnicities leading to variety of living patterns and changing languages and their dialects almost every 30 kilometers. This study explores the culture orientation of business managers in Pakistan from different ethnic groups working at different levels in different companies and explains their behavior on different dimensions of culture orientation. This is an empirical study of culture orientation, scenario based scale was used to measure each dimension of culture orientation. This study tried to determine how different ethnic groups of Pakistan behave in different dimensions of culture orientation at the work place, taking Punjabi, Muhajir, Sindhis, Saraiki, Baloch and Pashtoon as target participants as business managers in corporate sector of Pakistan. These ethnic groups can be found easily working at managerial level in different companies across Pakistan. SPSS software has been used for statistical analysis of survey responses. Results of the study indicate that there is meaningful difference in terms of culture orientation among managers of different ethnicities working in corporate sector of Pakistan, thus providing useful insight to industry professionals to devise strategic pattern while managing workforce in different parts of the country. Researcher provided tabulated conclusion at the end of the article for an analysis in a glance. Limitation which struck this study has also been elaborated by the author.

Keywords: culture orientation, ethnic groups, business managers, Pakistan