The relationship between national culture and the use of professional services: Evidence from two cross-country studies

Abstract

A B S T R A C TEach year, clients spend large sums on professional services, such as accounting services, legal services and consulting services. While research has found significant cross-country differences in organizations' spending on professional services, we do not know why they occur. Inspired by the organizational buying behavior literature, this paper investigates the influence of national culture on the use of professional services, particularly management consulting services. As the use of professional services involves considerable uncertainties-particularly for the buyer-it can be assumed to be influenced by cultural differences regarding the level of Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism and Masculinity. By drawing on two independent cross-country studies, we show that organizations in high uncertainty avoidance and individualistic cultures use professional services less than organizations in low uncertainty avoidance and collectivist cultures. We found no relationship between Hofstede's dimension of Masculinity and the use of professional services. The findings contribute to the theorizing on how the cultural context influences organizational buying behavior and the purchasing of professional services.

Management Consulting Trends in the CEE Region

“…Hungary has the largest and most developed consulting market in the region, which is also reflected in the relatively high number of technology patents. The extent of the Hungarian consulting industry partly reflects the government's conscious domestic business development policy, however, the demand for consulting can also be explained by socio-cultural factors (Pemer et al 2014, Pemer-Sieweke-Werr 2018, Barthélemy 2019, Pelczné-Szadai 2004. V4 countries rely heavily on foreign capital investments, so far, the Czech Republic has succeeded most in building its own internal innovation potential.…”

Explaining national variation in the use of management consulting knowledge: A framework

“…Given the dearth of research, this observation is intriguing for challenging purely economic and political accounts of consulting demand, but only scratches the surface (c.f. Pemer et al, forthcoming).…”

Does national culture matter? Understanding the impact of supply chain integration in multiple countries

“…With the aim to understand the roles of different national cultural dimensions in the relationship of SCI with firm performance, this study focuses on uncertainty avoidance and individualism. These two critical cultural dimensions are frequently examined (Handley and Angst, 2015; Pemer et al , 2018) over others because they are linked to establishing specific relational resources for inter-firm relationship, thereby most relevant to the examination of SCI effects (Handley and Angst, 2015), especially within the supply chain network (Durach and Wiengarten, 2020; Qu and Yang, 2015). Given the integration among individual firms within the supply chain, an individualistic culture exerts influences by negatively affecting the willingness to develop team advantage, thereby increasing the difficulty of integration (Park and Paiva, 2018).…”