Cooperation between French and Hungarian employees.
Résumé
Cross-cultural management literature recently shed lights on two themes: power and language, which usually complicates the picture of well-intended intercultural cooperations. In this paper we investigate a middle sized French company, which has subsidiaries in Central-Eastern-Europe. The focus of our investigation is the French-Hungarian relationship, and the mutual perception of the business cooperation. The major themes of mutual perceptions of what appeared to be critical issues in the cooperation process between Headquarters in Paris and the Hungarian subsidiary: (1) different expectations about respective roles (2) the language issues between the international entities, with customers and suppliers, (3) control, autonomy and trust between the headquarter and the subsidiary and (4) and differences of perceptions of power. Eight semi-structured interviews are the basis of interpretive analysis.