Swedish management style in Asia

In Singapore, there are today more than a hundred companies, successfully led by Swedish managers. Is there then a certain success model that Swedish corporate leaders use and apply in an Asian culture? Yes, to some extent, says language scientist, Cheryl Cordeiro-Nilsson, in her Ph.D. thesis that will be publicly defended at the University of Gothenburg the 9th of May 2009.

There is no doubt a manner of being and a way of communicating your point of view to colleges and subordinates that could be described as a particular Swedish management style. However, there is more to it than that. One thing that also comes into play in a wider aspect is the aptness Singapore as a nation shows in taking care of its ambitious immigrants.

Cheryl Cordeiro-Nilsson used a language-based analysis to study how Swedish managers behaved in a foreign culture. Her study is the first of its kind.

 – I was initially curious to see if I could find a success model that could show how Swedish managers became successful in their operations in Asia.

 – I was also intrigued by the way Singapore was able to attract international managers and large corporations, and to have them all cooperate and work in a foreign market, without any social frictions. Singapore is also successful economically in managing to become the fifth wealthiest country in the world in terms of purchasing power per capita in only a few decades.

 – It turned out that I cannot say that the success model is only due to the Swedish management style, but this must be seen in combination with Singapore's local business traditions with its roots in British colonial history beginning as early as 1819, when the nation was founded as a free trading port. We know that immigration was intensive from day one, and since Singapore was mostly without natural resources the only thing that counted were brains and personal ambitions of the people moving there to work.

The author has conducted 33 personal interviews with Swedish as well as Singapore Chinese leaders in Swedish owned and managed corporations in Singapore. Topics that were discussed the most were questions about hierarchy and assimilation / integration. In these cases, the Singapore-Chinese point of view was entirely different from the Swedish point of view.

Swedish managers were also often sent out specifically with the mission to or at least with the expectations of bringing their own values and know-how to implement at their foreign workplaces.

 – What I had expected to find was a hybrid style of management that might have developed in cross-cultural workplaces, giving rise to some kind of new and successful "Scandinasian" management style. But this is not what happened. At least not in the short term as far as my study shows. What appeared instead was a daily power struggle where the Swedes and the Singapore-Chinese managers plain and simple, tested what worked. A few of the Singapore Chinese respondents maintained that in these situations that, "the Swedes are very stubborn".

Examples of culture differences ranged from choice of cars to how offices should be decorated, how customers were received and how status symbols were displayed or worn, but there were also serious questions to be handled such as how the managers dealt with bad news, and questions about security for themselves and their families.

To conclude, it turned out that the success model for the Swedes and Singapore Chinese leaders appeared to be a combination of how Singapore as a nation has learnt to take care of its ambitious immigrants, and how the Swedish leaders in their own consensus seeking style went about doing their work.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson

Those who are extra interested is welcome at the public defense held Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Old Hovrätten Room T302, Olof Wijksgatan 6, Gothenburg.

Invitation and more information is available at Cheryl's blog: http://www.cmariec.com/blog/?p=1477
and Web site: http://www.cmariec.com/

Supervisors for this study were:

Professor Sally Boyd
Dean of Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Professor Joseph A. Foley,
Graduate School of English, Assumption University, Thailand

With regards Swedish management study, the following were consulted:

Professor Sten Jönsson
School of Business, Economics and Law
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Swedish management style in Asia

On Saturday, 9 May, 2009, Cheryl Marie Cordeiro will be going up to publicly defend her dissertation in General Linguistics, at the University of Gothenburg. Title of the thesis is: Swedish Management in Singapore: a discourse analysis.

The thesis uses discourse analysis to study Swedish Management in Singapore. This study is a first of its kind and what makes it even more interesting is that both its methods and the results are commercially applicable.

 – What I was looking for in this study was a success model Swedish business leaders or top managers applied when working in Asia. But there really wasn't’t one to be found. My study rather indicated that a combination of factors in how Singapore as a nation took care of its ambitious immigrants, and how the Swedish managers went about doing their work in a cross cultural environment.

 – Part of the explanation of success of cross-cultural working relation lies in Singapore's history, where Singapore began as a British colony as late as 1819 as a free port of trade. Immigration was intense from day one, and as Singapore lacked natural resources, what remained was the creativity and drive of its people.

In Singapore there are today more than a hundred companies, successfully led by Swedish managers. Is there then a certain success model that Swedish corporate leaders use and apply in an Asian culture?

It was interesting for me to explore how Singapore could attract good managers and large companies from around the world and make everything work without any marked social frictions. Economically, Singapore has also risen to the fifth richest country in the world in terms of purchasing power per capita in just a few decades. It was thus this aspect of success that I set out to investigate in my study.

That this became a study of Swedish management in Singapore was more of a coincidence, since I happened to get to know one of the founders of the project of the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III ship, who pointed out Scandinavia’s lack of colonial history in Asia. Sweden has never tried to rule over any part of Asia with military might, but it has always favoured trade, science and the exchange of knowledge in research.

I felt that if we managed to figure out the parts in this concept of success, that it would be valuable and interesting for many corporations and nations.

It’s while working with such broad questions as these pertaining to cross-cultural trade and leadership styles that a study based in language analysis is valuable since that enabled me to gain access to large and combined experiences of the individuals who took part in this study.

My study began in 2004 with 33 personal interviews of Swedish and Singapore Chinese leaders in Swedish or Swedish managed organizations in Singapore. That rendered a total of 49 hours of interviews, with approximately 1.5 hours each. The transcribed interviews gave a corpus data of 260,178 words.

All statements were sorted manually and when I was done, I found 252 different topics, which could be sorted into six categories that more or less encompassed each other. It began with the individual as the core component of analysis and beyond that were the family, organization, society, nation and environment. When I looked into what the respondents talked about most, already here I began to see the forming of some patterns.

The largest category with the highest number of topics was the organization. Within this group, the concepts of hierarchy, and integration / assimilation, were by far the largest issues of concern. So it was decided that these were the concepts this study was going to focus on.

I mention this, not to describe what I have been studying per se, but rather to show how much that is left that could be studied in the collected material. By sorting the data however, I went straight to what was of most interest for the respondents and found the key points to what both the Singapore as a nation and the Swedish business managers were doing right.

I noticed that Swedes who come to Singapore often settled themselves close to their own kind. If you want, we can say that they segregated themselves upon arrival. This is something that Singaporeans are familiar with and it’s perhaps the same with everyone who comes here to work, not only Swedes. The reasons and the time span varies. It is always good to have neighbours you can go to when help and advice are needed and who will understand your problems. It has always been like this. Which is why we have whole areas called Chinatown, Little India, Arab Street, Malay Village, Bugis Village and Holland Village, etc. depending on nationality.

The next thing that happens is integration, meaning that the Swedish leaders create for themselves a small platform where they can work in society, within their institutions and organizations. It is also often the case that they have been sent to their foreign subsidiaries from Sweden, to bring Swedish values, know-how and implement these at their Singapore workplaces.

Generally speaking, I think we can say that the Swedish managers and their Singapore-Chinese counterparts approached each other in a process that was both quick and purposeful.

The process of best practice at work is what both the Swedish and the Singapore-Chinese managers were discussing most of all. It is during this period of integration that they test their ideas against each other, and the most common questions are things that pertain to hierarchy. In this, the Singapore-Chinese point of view is entirely different from the Swedish point of view. Here, I had expected that the organizational culture would allowed for the development of a mixed style of management, a cross-bred Scandiasian style of management. But this was not the case. What happens at work instead is a daily power struggle where they end up trying what works, and in this, my Singapore-Chinese respondents voice that "the Swedes can be terribly stubborn."

Cultural differences between the Swedes and the Singapore-Chinese include everything from the choice of cars when receiving a guest to how offices are decorated and how status symbols are worn and displayed. But differences on more serious questions do arise, such as how to deal with bad news and issues of security for themselves and their families.

What happens in a long term course is assimilation. The foreigner eventually blends in and becomes part of the local unity. This is a mutual diachronic process that is outside of my study, but comes to be, eventually. Take for example Christianity, the maypole, stuffed cabbage roll, pizza and hamburgers in Sweden where not many question how it came to be in Sweden, but are things and events that simply exist in the country, naturalized.

I believe that my investigation can be summarized with the point that Singapore is aware that to move into a new country, to integrate, learn about the culture and eventually assimilate, is a process that takes time. To nurture this process, as one would care for a sapling, is what creates the wealth of a nation. I also belive it turned out that the success model for the Swedes and their Singapore-Chinese counterparts appeared to be a combination of how Singapore as a nation has learnt to take care of its ambitious immigrants, and how the Swedish leaders in their own consensus seeking style went about doing their work.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson

Those who are extra interested is welcome at the public defense held Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Old Hovrätten Room T302, Olof Wijksgatan 6, Göteborg.

Invitation and more information is available at Cheryl's blog: http://www.cmariec.com/blog/?p=1477
and Web site: http://www.cmariec.com/

Supervisors for this study were:

Professor Sally Boyd
Dean of Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Professor Joseph A. Foley,
Graduate School of English, Assumption University, Thailand

With regards Swedish management study, the following were consulted:

Professor Sten Jönsson
School of Business, Economics and Law
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Swedish managers in Singapore,
laying the foundation for a more integrated Sweden?

In my 26 years in Singapore, I have come to understand that cooperation between individuals is a crucial factor in both economic and social success.

Singapore has an open policy towards expatriates and I grew up in a country where Caucasians were considered part and parcel of the national workforce. But the world is becoming an increasingly small place to live in and expatriates in Singapore today have doubled in their presence in this metropolitan city state. Many organizations today are multinational in nature in order to operate on the global scene. Managers in such organizations are often located away from their home countries in order to continue the work of the organization on a global scale, contributing to the existence, expansion and success of the organization.

In early 2000, I had the opportunity to become friends with some Scandinavian managers working in Singapore. We got to chat and talk about life in Singapore, living and working abroad etc. and the questions that arose in my mind were, what made these expatriate managers want to live and work abroad? And what factors made their cooperative efforts with their Asian counterparts successful? It was these questions that set the goal and orientation of my Ph.D. thesis, which is the study of Scandinavian management in Singapore.

A brief check with Exportrådet also showed that Sweden is today more active in terms of setting up businesses and business affiliates overseas than ever before. With its current trading figures, Asia seems to hold the most promising trade for Sweden: China in 2005 for example had 44,000 Chinese employed in Swedish organizations with an annual intake of 7.9 billion US dollars. Sweden’s presence in China since 2003 has also doubled (Serger, Schwaag and Widman, 2005). The Swedish Trade Council reported in their Export Managers Index (EMI) 2008, third quarter are also forecasting highest export sales growth in Asia (Swedish Trade Council, Export Managers Index, 2008)

The fast-growing markets for Swedish exports today are found in Asia, especially Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. Asia now accounts for 8.4 percent of Swedish trade, making it the most important single region outside of Europe (Statistics Sweden, 2008). As Asia is one of the fastest growing markets for Swedish exports, the increasing Scandinavian and Asian international trade relations create a need for a better understanding of management styles and working relations in the interdependent countries. Several research studies found that a contributing factor to many failed cross national joint ventures and start-ups is due to a lack of understanding of international markets, cultures and management behavior. A greater chance of both tangible and intangible success will thus depend on understanding and acting upon the similarities and differences between management behavior in different international markets.

In 2004, 33 interviews with top-level managers in Swedish owned organizations were held in Singapore, at the convenience of the managers. The respondents were chosen primarily because they were leaders in the organization and it was assumed that their decisions would affect the steering and success of the foreign subsidiary Swedish organization. The result was that the respondents came from a wide variety of industries ranging in age from 28 to 60 years old. Of the 33 respondents, 10 were Singapore Chinese top-level managers, who worked on a daily basis with the Swedes in a cross-cultural environment. The questions to the respondents were wide ranging and relaxed in long interview format. The goal of which was to get them to speak with me in a one and a half hour long session, as if they had known me for the longest time.

The data collected rendered about 49 hours of interview time and 540 A4 pages of transcribed data. Using the coding procedures from grounded theory, the data was sorted according to topics. A resulting 252 topics were retrieved from the data, of which this was sorted into 6 larger categories, that relate to a socio-cultural context with the Individual as the core of the makings of a society.

The context then radiates outwards, moving to encompass larger units of the social fabric, such as the family and social category and then organization, society and national and environment. The result of this categorizing process is that it enables a more organized and consistent manner in which to view and further analyze the data.

The Organization category was found to have contained the greatest number of topics and from there, only the top 50% of the topics in that category was filtered. These topics were then grouped together to form larger concepts, such as that of hierarchy and then assimilation / integration. These two topics were then further investigated with a discourse analysis framework.

The findings of this study showed that the Swedes and the Singapore Chinese understood the concept of hierarchy differently. Whilst the Swedes saw a more lateral hierarchy, where the leaders or bosses in charge were accessible to those further out in the organization leadership level, the Singapore Chinese tended to view hierarchy vertically, so that leaders and bosses only communicated with those immediately subordinate to them and expected them to communicate with the others in the organization. The boss was also highly respected in the Singapore Chinese management style where bosses are hardly questioned or contradicted. Nothing is discussed openly. Whereas in the Swedish context, open discussions are preferred and different opinions are encouraged by the bosses.

When it came to the concept of assimilation / integration, what was obvious was that neither the Swedes nor the Singapore Chinese spoke about assimilation of working styles. In fact, there was hardly any integration as I had myself expected to witness in the findings of this study, to render a ‘Scandinasian’ management style, but rather, the analysis showed a constant, everyday struggle in negotiating power positions between the two groups. When it came to solving problems at work, it was either ‘your’ way or ‘my’ way. Usually, the best method or best practice wins in the Swedish owned / related offices in Singapore.

It is difficult to say whether there existed an integrated style of management but it could be hypothesized that Swedish managed organizations in Singapore develop an integrated organizational culture where Swedes and Singaporeans work well together in greater understanding of each others’ culture, adopting best practices from each other in order to benefit the organization. This integrated organizational culture and the adoption of 'best practice' policies could well be the key to the organization’s success in Asia. Apart from the academic contributions of this study to the fields of Swedish management and discourse analysis studies, what good would the findings of this study be? In commercial sectors, the findings of this study is applicable to HR management, where organizations can draw up a profile of the best possible person to send overseas. This person not only needs to be a forefront specialist in knowledge in the organization’s products, but s/he needs to be a Swedish culture-carrier and a person who thrives when working in a multicultural context.

As organizations can be seen as a smaller cosmos of the workings of society at large, the findings on the integrative efforts of the Swedes and Singaporeans when working together could possibly hint at how well a true effort at integration can benefit on a larger scale. The Swedes in Singapore were never there to fully integrate into the Singapore society; and one can definitely forget about them assimilating. They were there rather to bring over Swedish culture to Singapore, a Swedish way of doing things. But as things are in Singapore, the locals would never allow the Swede to fully take over and gain way, so that a lot of times, the Singaporean wants to have things their way. After a while, things are such that people do what is best for the organization as a whole, learning from each other and progressing. Which is a far cry from the nation wide immigration policies in Sweden.

As a foreigner in Sweden, I am well acquainted with the routine of filling up immigrant forms, not speaking the language and generally, trying to fit into the Swedish way of doing things and way of life. While some voices in Sweden push for integration rather than assimilation, what is well known in its institutions is rather assimilation practices. All forms to be filled out are in Swedish for example.

Most governmental web sites as well as Swedish university web sites are written in Swedish with limited English translation. All foreigners are required to go for Swedish language courses if they even think of pursuing further education here or get a job. The nation wide strategy towards foreigners is clearly one that points towards assimilation, even if the people of Sweden are more open and tolerate (some even celebrate) Chinese New Year or Ramadan festivities for example. The findings of this study lend a different point of view on cross-cultural living and working. It suggests that organizations benefit from the cross-cultural fertilization of ideas and working practices that a fine balance can be reached, eventually, between people of different histories, culture, religions and social backgrounds. And it is perhaps this effective strategy, currently being played out in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore that should be analyzed and best practices adopted for Sweden’s governmental strategies towards immigrants? Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson

Those who are extra interested is welcome at the public defense held Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Old Hovrätten Room T302, Olof Wijksgatan 6, Göteborg.

Invitation and more information is available at Cheryl's blog: http://www.cmariec.com/blog/?p=1477
and Web site: http://www.cmariec.com/

Supervisors for this study were:

Professor Sally Boyd
Dean of Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Professor Joseph A. Foley,
Graduate School of English, Assumption University, Thailand

With regards Swedish management study, the following were consulted:

Professor Sten Jönsson
School of Business, Economics and Law
University of Gothenburg, Sweden