Which of Hofstedes cultural dimensions is concerned with how much people prefer to focus on themselves?

9.6.4 Uncertainty Avoidance

According to Hofstede, uncertainty avoidance reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty. Cultures that score high in uncertainty avoidance prefer rules (e.g., about religion and food) and structured circumstances, and employees tend to remain longer with their current employer. Table 9.2 shows the values for several countries in the uncertainty avoidance column. Mediterranean cultures (Greece, 112), Latin America (Guatemala, 101), and Japan (92) rank the highest in this category, whereas Singapore (8) ranks the lowest.

In user research, uncertainty avoidance will influence the results and the process in many ways. Understanding the perception of uncertainty is important in all of the cultures involved, from the client side to the evaluator side, the local moderator, and the venue – if e.g., the client accepts little uncertainty but the venue management accepts a high degree of uncertainty, the client may misunderstand the venue management's attitude and experience anxiety.

A client from a high uncertainty avoidance culture may expect a project to need more formal documentation and more structure than a moderator from a low uncertainty avoidance culture can deliver. This may manifest itself in the extent of the feedback and in the attentiveness to formal rules in planning and conducting the research, and also in practicalities such as the times a meeting or a research session is supposed to start and end (strictly on time or “more or less”) and who actually attends the meeting or the research. This dimension can help highlight expectations about the patience levels and security/safety levels among the project members to avoid anxiety and misunderstandings.

Organisational models – power distance and uncertainty avoidance relationships

Power distance and uncertainty avoidance characteristics are associated with distinct models or types of organisation. In countries where there is a combination of a high ranking on the power distance dimension with a high need to avoid uncertainty, the typical organisation type has been termed the ‘full bureaucracy’ or pyramid model (Hofstede, 2001: 377). As the name pyramid suggests, this organisation type is strongly hierarchical, and roles and functions will be clearly differentiated. It has been argued that technologies that promote and facilitate the dissemination of information in this organisation type would be implemented with considerable difficulty (Davison and Jordan, 1996). Full bureaucracies are most likely to be found in Latin, Mediterranean and Islamic countries, as well as Japan and some other Asian countries.

In contrast, in countries with a low ranking on the power distance dimension with a low need to avoid uncertainty about the future such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand, the typical organisation type will be implicitly structured, and is known as the market model (Hofstede 2001: 377). In this organisation type more importance is likely to be accorded to relationships between people than to rules and regulations (Mead, 1990: 26).

Although the cultural characteristics that define this organisation type may welcome technologies that enhance access to information, control aspects may not be so favourably received. As mentioned above, EDRMS may be particularly unsuited to this type of workplace. Not only do current manifestations of EDRMS necessitate work practices which may be perceived as additional burdens by the end user, but they also impose a formality which may appear at odds to informal, relationship-based working environment.

In my Australian case study, systems had been established for different functional areas, and sometimes for individual tasks within those functions, but little attention had been paid to the need for integration of those systems. Therefore there was no coherent way to manage information needed by different work units. There were, for example, no fewer than three quite separate information systems involved in the publication of course materials. All generated essential information, but all operated independently of each other.

The third type of organisation is the personnel bureaucracy, likely to be typical in countries characterised by a high ranking on the power distance dimension coupled with a low need to avoid uncertainty about the future. This has been termed the family model (Hofstede, 2001: 377). As this term suggests, this organisation type is centred on a strong leader whose authority is associated with the individual, rather than the rank or position which he or she holds. These organisations are likely to be found in China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore, for example. As with full bureaucracies, technologies that facilitate the dissemination of information may be regarded as a threat rather than a benefit in this organisation type.

The final organisation type is likely to be found in countries with a low ranking on the power distance dimension associated with a high need to avoid uncertainty about the future. This organisation type has been referred to as a workflow bureaucracy (Mead, 1990: 26) or more descriptively as a ‘well-oiled machine’ (Hofstede, 2001: 377). These organisations are most likely to be found in the German-speaking world of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Here, in contrast to the market model, more emphasis is placed on regulating activities. This would seem to be the ideal organisation type in terms of accomplishing records management objectives. Theoretically there should be no major concerns about inhibiting or restricting access to information from a defending the hierarchy perspective. Furthermore, any well-oiled machine will have very clearly identified workflows which will facilitate the identification of activities that should result in the creation of records. The fluidity and lack of fixity associated with the market model is just not apparent here, a boon for records managers!

These four organisation types are applied to the scenarios described in the final chapter.

Executive Summary

From a marketing-strategic perspective, a company that defines itself as cross-culturally aware knows (or should know) that creating appealing and efficient websites for other cultures is no longer just a matter of language and modification of time- and date-formats.

—Wurtz, 2005

Costa Rica is a high-context, collectivist culture with high uncertainty avoidance. Many Costa Rican sites emphasize nature, people, and government. A website designed for them should focus on the following:

Clarity and predictability

Cooperation and feminine characteristics

Government authority and regulations, where applicable

Nature and family

The UPS website for Costa Rica is well designed, but details were overlooked that could greatly improve the site. In this report, I review three pages: Home, Tracking, and Support. I suggest redesign options for each that will help to declutter content, place the focus where it belongs, and emphasize values important to Costa Rican users. When viewing and redesigning the current UPS pages, I considered the following questions:

Does the information hierarchy always highlight what’s most important? This design element is crucial for a high uncertainty-avoidance culture.

Do the images and animation focus on nature? On cooperation? And on feminine aspects? These subtle details speak to the audience along cultural lines. For example, users may not explicitly state that they want to see images of nature, but research shows they are drawn to it. Any design efforts should focus on incorporating values considered important by the target culture.

Is the page overwhelming? Good design calls for creating pages that display information in a visually pleasing manner. Adequate use of whitespace, alignment, font style, and more all prevent a page from looking cluttered—even when a lot of content is present.

Can users anticipate what happens next? Controls, links, videos, dropdowns— everything must be predictable. Users must have a good idea about what will happen when they click something on the page.

Screenshots are provided of the original pages and the suggested redesigns. The changes respect the corporate template employed by UPS, while offering a more culturally sensitive design. Culture is in design, and design is in the details. Understanding a culture’s impact on design and its importance in reaching a global audience is essential to success in today’s market.

V.A. Culture

Social anthropologists consider culture as the “collective programming of the mind” to distinguish one group of people from another one. Hofstede states: “Culture is learned, not inherited. It derives from one's social environment, not from one's genes.” According to Hofstede, culture should be separated from an individual's personality and human nature. The “ecology fallacy” problem can occur for any study without making any distinction among them. Culture should not be measured in real and absolute value because it cannot be compared.

Culture manifests itself in symbols, heroes, rituals, and values. Symbols represent the most superficial and value the deepest manifestations of culture, with heroes and rituals in between. Legacy about heroes can be written and told while rituals and symbols can be observed. Value, however, is intrinsic and can hardly be observed or told. One way to measure a people's value is to interpret statements about desires. In 1983, Hofstede designed questionnaires to ask IBM employees from 55 countries about how they thought the world ought to be (the desirable) versus what they want for themselves (the desired). Hofstede identified four cultural dimensions to represent values of different cultures—power distance, individualism, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance. Each cultural dimension is quantified with a specific indicator to illustrate each country's differences.

The Power Distance Indicator (PDI) stands for “the extent to which the less powerful person in a society accepts inequality in power and considers it as normal.” Malaysia (PDI = 104), Mexico (81), India (77), Singapore (74), and Brazil (69) are good examples of high power distance culture. In contrast, the countries with lower power distance culture include Austria (11), Israel (13), Ireland (22), Great Britain (35), Australia (36), Canada (39) and the United States (40).

The high Individualism Index (IDV) pertains to “society in which the ties between individuals are loose” while the low IDV or high collectivism refers to “society in which people from birth onward are integrated into strong, cohesive ingroups, which continue throughout a people's lifetime and continues to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.” USA (IDV = 91), Australia (90), Great Britain (89), Canada (80) and South Africa (65) are good examples of high individualism culture. In contrast, the countries with lower individualism or high collectivism culture include Guatemala (6), Taiwan (17), Thailand (20), Mexico (30), Arab countries (38), and Japan (46).

Men who live in the high Masculinity Index (MAS) society are more “assertive, tough, and focused” and women are more “modest and tender.” Role differences between genders are not so distinct in the femininity society. Japan (95), Austria (79), Italy (70), Mexico (69), and the United States (62) have higher MAS. Sweden (5), Denmark (16), Thailand (34), South Korea (39), and Taiwan (45) have lower MAS or a stronger femininity culture.

The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations, and the feelings of nervous stress, predictability, and a need for written rules are good indicators for uncertainty avoidance. Countries with high uncertainty avoidance index (UAI) include Greece (112), Japan (92), France (86), Mexico (82), Israel (81), and Germany (65). The low UAI countries are Singapore (8), Denmark (23), Great Britain (35) and the United States (46).

Straub researched how culture can influence people's attitude toward using IT in achieving individual and organizational productivity gains. He found that people from low IDV countries tend to avoid using IT in supporting individual and organizational productivity. Igbaria and Anandarajan also confirm the evidence by studying computer usage in Nigeria, a country with the low IDV culture (20) in relation to the United States (91). Since low IDV people often come from a culture where indicators of PDI, MAS, and UAI are low, Straub reformulated a computer-mediated support indicator (CMSI) to represent cultural influences to the perceived usefulness of IT and its actual use. Straub's research findings recommend considering cultural factors (e.g., CMSI) when deploying GIS.

All nationalities possess unique cultures that have to be integrated into the design and deployment of GIS. A study by Marcus and Gould on the awareness of cultures in the global web user-interface design showed that Hofstede's cultural considerations can significantly improve the performance and the receptivity of the Web on a worldwide basis. Marcus and Gould suggest that a web design with cultural sensitivity can attract more real and global customers, not visitors to improve revenue of the bottom line. The above discussion suggests that culture influences GIS designs (symbols) and adoption (values). When deploying GIS, cultural impacts have to be carefully assessed and well integrated into GIS.

Hofstede's concept of five cultural dimensions

Hofstede studied national cultures within organizations using survey responses from IBM employees worldwide. This study resulted in his definition of the first four dimensions of culture. He later contracted research in Asia to add the fifth dimension for Asian countries. Here's a quick review of the five dimensions:

Power distance—the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and groups expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.

Individualism vs. collectivism—the extent to which a culture values individual emphasis (achievement focus) versus collective/group welfare (affiliation focus).

Uncertainty avoidance—the extent to which the culture's members feel threatened by uncertain, unknown situations or embrace these situations.

Masculinity vs. femininity—the extent to which cultures value assertive (masculine) behavior versus modest (feminine) behavior.

Long-term vs. short-term orientation—the extent to which cultures are influenced by Confucian philosophy. This dimension was added when Hofstede realized that the first four dimensions were European-centric. The Confucian philosophy defines the relation of individuals within the hierarchy of a family and social organizations and places a high value on hard work and education, and the need for patience and perseverance in waiting for rewards.

Hofstede positions the countries and regions of the world on a scale that roughly ranges from 0 to 100. The usefulness of the scale is not so much in the specific place of a country on the scale but in comparing the dimensions of a country or culture in relation to others.

For example, if we use Hofstede's scale (based on the numbers in the 2010 edition) to compare the dimensions of the United States and China, we see the following differences:

China scores high on power distance and extremely high on long-term orientation, relatively low on uncertainty avoidance, and extremely low on individualism. The U.S. scores place that country generally on the opposite end of the scale from China (with the exception of similar scores on masculinity). The most extreme differences are reflected in individualism—the United States has the highest score—and long-term orientation—China has the highest score.

So, how does this information help you understand the two cultures? Although any distinctions you can draw from the differences in these dimensions must be tested with real users, you can use this information as a benchmark to learn how your users respond on the basis of cultural distinctions such as these. You could test your current product to learn what the cultural issues are. Or you could redesign your product to address the potential cultural differences, then test to see whether your design matches users' expectations.

Not everyone is a fan of Hofstede's work or its application to interaction design. For insights into the issues some have expressed, see McSweeney, 2002, and Light, 2009.

For instance, if you are designing or modifying a website for Chinese users, you might want to study the user's experience reflected in the following dimensions:

For an analysis of websites applying Hofstede's cultural dimensions, see Aaron Marcus and Associates' report, “Cultural Dimensions and Global Web Design: What? So What? Now What?” 2001.

High power distance—Is this dimension addressed through a focus on authority figures, certifications, expertise?

High collectivism/low individualism—Is this dimension addressed through an emphasis on loyalty to customers and easy access to people who can answer questions and be available to help? Does the site properly focus on the greater good of society rather than the gains of the individual?

High uncertainty avoidance—Is this dimension addressed through a clearly stated and easily located return policy and warranty information? Are users' needs met by the inclusion of customer reviews? Can users navigate the site with confidence because of links and labels that are clear and obvious? Can they avoid making mistakes? If they make a mistake, can they easily and obviously recover?

High long-term orientation—Is this dimension addressed through a prominent display of information about the company's longevity and its success in building strong relationships with partners or customers?

For an example of how to apply Hofstede's cultural dimensions in designing or redesigning a website, see the case study analysis of the UPS website for Costa Rica at the end of this chapter.

The Question of Hofstede

Trying to get your head around all the issues in understanding culture begs for a model that can organize all the elements and help you start thinking about how to use cultural information in design.

The model most people reach for is Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. It’s certainly the most quoted, with some of the dimensions now part of general terminology. Concepts like “power distance” and “collectivism vs. individualism” came up in conversations without any special reference.

If you haven’t seen this work before, it’s a simple model, with five dimensions upon which any culture can be classified. It’s based on quantitative research over many years, starting with a study of IBM employees around the world.

Geert Hofstede, Cultural Dimensions, http://www.geert-hofstede.com/ (Hofstede, Hofstede, Minkov 2010; Hofstede 2001).

HOFSTEDE’S DIMENSIONS

Power distance, or the degree of inequality among people that the population of a country considers as normal, looks at how much people accept and expect that power is distributed unequally (from relatively equal to extremely unequal).

Individualism, or the degree to which people in a country have learned to act as individuals rather than as members of cohesive groups such as extended loyal groups and families (from collectivist to individualist).

Masculinity, or the degree to which “masculine” values like assertiveness, performance, success, and competition prevail over “feminine” values like the quality of life, maintaining warm personal relationships, service, caring, and solidarity (from tender to tough).

Uncertainty avoidance, or the degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations and their tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, and diversity of approach (from relatively flexible to extremely rigid).

Time orientation, or the degree to which thrift and perseverance, respect for tradition, and fulfilling social expectations are valued (from long term (LTO) to short term (STO)).

Just mentioning Hofstede brings out strong reactions. Despite how often Hofstede is mentioned—especially regarding power distance and individualism dimensions—his work is controversial for several reasons:

Conflation of nationality and culture

Focus within IBM, already a transnational organization

Focus on management, not design

For some, Hofstede’s dimensions have the value of being a starting point for their own investigations and as a framework on which they can hang their analysis of patterns of behavior. It’s useful for researchers like Katharina Reineke, who are looking for ways to manage personalization in a culturally sensitive but automated way. Her work to allow culturally-based personalization started with discovering that her European approaches to e-learning didn't work well in Rwanda. In her research for her Ph.D., she developed an approach that enables user interfaces to automatically adapt their visual presentation and workflows to the preferences of users depending on their cultural background. She used some of the Hofstede dimensions to create a measurable scale that she can turn into an software algorithm. But she also found that she needed personal characteristics like age to be able to predict preference well.

Aaron Marcus tried using the dimensions and thought about how they might affect design. This was in 1993, when the idea was novel (at least in the United States), but in the end, he found it hard to translate these theoretical concepts into design principles. Filip Sapienza also tried to apply Hofstede’s broad quantitative model to his own research with bicultural groups of US Latinos and Chinese-Americans. Rather than scores that fell between their two countries, as the model might predict, participants' scores fell outside the ranges for either one. He concluded bicultural populations, especially immigrants, “experience wide shifts in their cultural sensibilities when transitioning from one society to another” (AM+A 2001; Sapienza 2010a, 2010b).

Ultimately, attitudes toward Hofstede (and other ways of looking at culture) may come down to the difference between social scientists and ethnographers—between a top-down quantitative view that offers a strong model and a bottom-up qualitative view that offers rich description. Hofstede’s dimensions may be valuable for defining descriptive concepts, even if they are not as useful as specific research in the appropriate context for making design decisions.

Ann Light (2009) writes that Hofstede “is held up as evidence that tidy answers exist somewhere to untidy problems.” Her report from an OzCHI 2008 workshop suggest that as important as Hofstede’s guidance on cultural diversity is, for design research, if you want to understand a very different culture, you have to get first-hand experience, not design from a recipe book. Her article concludes: “So if you’re designing for a culture you’re not familiar with, here’s the best advice: read Hofstede’s work and put it back on the shelf with everyone else’s. Then engage in ‘good listening’ with the people you’re designing for. Use cultural guides and technical probes to help bridge the communications gap. And keep your attitude and methodology flexible—the unexpected is where the most important ideas await. Talk to others who do this work and are interested in cultural perspectives.”

You can read more about this work (Vanderbeeken, O'Loughlin, 2010) at http://www.experientia.com/blog/experientiasframework-for-behavioural-change-towards-sustainable-lifestyles/

A FRAMEWORK FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Models may be more useful for helping UX designers understand cultural influences when they focus on specific types of attitudes or behaviors that are relevant for specific types of projects. When Experientia, an Italian UX company, worked on a social change project in Finland, they developed a framework to help designers understand the different forces that influence whether people will make changes in their attitudes and behaviors.

One of the challenges of designing for social change is that the products cannot simply fit existing contexts, behaviors, or attitudes, because its goal is to change those very things. Instead, they focused on different aspects of motivation. This model allows designers to tailor their program for a specific context in specific ways.

Their model, for example, defines four different kinds of actions that need to take place for social change.

Engagement and Awareness: Ways to present meaningful and contextual information. Engagement with a new behavior is more likely to be sustained long term if it is easier and more convenient than previous patterns; for example, making it easier to recycle technological waste products or creating systems that automatically reuse grey water in gardens without any extra effort.

Community Actions: We are social animals and react to our neighbors’ or peers’ behavior. Change requires creating a pool of shared knowledge, accessible to all members of the community, and putting support mechanisms and networks in place to encourage compliance.

Self-Assessment: To translate understanding into action, people need to be able to see the real impact of their individual or group actions. Includes immediate feedback and rewards, from emotional satisfaction. At a community level, the ability to evaluate joint consumption and carbon emissions is an important tool for highlighting the need for further action, and the opportunity to reward sustained change.

Leading by Example: Encouraging individuals to change is vital, but the impact has to occur at the community, regional, and national level. This acknowledges the broader context.

4 Results and comparisons

In the previous section, we have surveyed the most important knowledge sharing mechanisms in the project teams. We described the most important knowledge sharing mechanisms until 2015. We found the factors that directly affect knowledge sharing are more important than the factors that have an indirect effect. For example, X. Zhang, De Pablos, and Xu (2014) suggested some cultural values (i.e., collectivism) directly impact knowledge sharing, while most cultural values (i.e., power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and Confucian dynamism) have interactive effects with knowledge sharing motivations. The effect of these factors may be helpful or harmful. During our review, we found that knowledge sharing is the important key to maintain organizations in a world of flexibility and competitiveness. In general, the most important advantages of these techniques are: First, knowledge sharing in teams can increase employee’s productivity and performance. Second, knowledge sharing between organizations makes that competitive advantages facilitate sustaining. Third, managers and team leaders learn that knowledge sharing between project teams enhances the efficiency of project work and organizational learning. Fourth, knowledge-sharing makes the tasks do faster. Fifth, knowledge sharing within project teams is widely recognized as a critical success factor. In addition to its contribution to project success, knowledge sharing plays a critical role in promoting innovation, developing organizational agility and generating overall organizational value. Sixth, knowledge sharing among organization members, as well as between the organization and its customers, suppliers, and alliance partners, greatly facilitate the process of improving the quality of customer service, reducing production cycles, increasing the cooperation between different department units, and consolidating the relationships with alliance partners, which thus enhances the organization’s competitive advantage. However, it has some weakness where the most important of these weaknesses are: first, sharing knowledge in the organizations is sometimes in favor of a rival. Second, there is a fear of losing the jobs for people. Third, traditional thoughts and opinions prevent the knowledge sharing in project teams.

In addition, we compared and evaluated the factors that have an effect on knowledge sharing to find which factor is more important in any group. Furthermore, we identify the most important and least important factors that have an effect on knowledge sharing. Table 4 provides an overview of the discussed knowledge sharing techniques in project teams and their main features where tick mark indicates that the authors in their paper investigated the desired parameter, and cross mark indicates that the authors did not refer to the desired parameter for culture, learning, creativity, knowledge management, organizational climate, knowledge exchange, the development of close, relationships, performance, trust, communication quality, job satisfaction, attitude toward knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge sharing, rewards. According to the performed SLR of knowledge sharing mechanisms until to 2015, we determined the number of published articles have very high 2012. In addition, the greatest number of articles published in famous journals. IEEE with 16%, Emerald and Elsevier with 11%, and Wiley with 10% of published articles (among 71 articles) have the highest published articles in the journals and conferences respectably.

Table 4. An overview of the discussed knowledge sharing techniques and their main features where the tick mark indicates that the authors in their paper investigated the desired parameter, and cross mark indicates that the authors in their paper did not refer to the desired parameter for culture, learning, creativity, knowledge management, organizational climate, knowledge exchange, the development of close relationships, performance, trust, communication quality, job satisfaction, attitude toward knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge sharing, rewards.

The results of the provided comparison in Table 4 show that knowledge sharing and knowledge management is important in all articles. The motivation of the employees, climate, and organizational culture are important to create opportunities for knowledge sharing and creativity. Performance, quality of information and trust, in turn, has a significant impact on knowledge sharing in organizations. Finally, it can be seen that all factors are essential for effective knowledge sharing.

7 Open issues

This section offers several important issues until now as research directions in the CRM that have not been comprehensively and thoroughly studied. By discussing and analyzing the mentioned state of the art techniques, there has been observed that there is no independent technique that addresses all issues involved in CRM. For example, some techniques consider providing trust, knowledge management, and data quality while some totally ignore these issues. Furthermore, most of the discussed techniques have been used with simulation to evaluate and test the proposed techniques. However, some others techniques can be tested in real-world scenarios to provide a very realistic result. In addition, formal verification and behavioral modeling of some techniques seem very interesting direction for future research.

Security and privacy are other challenging research areas that are not considered in many of CRM techniques. Another important matter in security issue is the case of malicious peers that is not considered in many of the techniques. In addition, retention, trust, and validity can be considered for enhancing the security of CRM technique. Moreover, online trust and reputation can be considered for enhancing the security of CRM technique. Designing a caching mechanism to improve the performance of CRM technique will become a challenging problem. Choosing some surrogate peers to redirect the customer's requests to, which the request should be cached and how long the request should be considered are very challenging.

Another interesting line for future researchers can be the investigation of the role of uncertainty avoidance and social norms on actual purchase behavior to enhance the E-CRM effectively. Further investigation of this new understanding of trust, such as its relationship to commitment in online transactions, should be followed in future research. It should examine the impact of E-CRM 2.0 practices on performance metrics such as the level of customer loyalty, customer profitability, sales data, quality levels and company reputation. In addition, it could be directed towards the following topics. An increasing amount of research is looking into the application of social network analysis and intellectual capital theory for describing and measuring the value of online social networks. Human intellectual capital theories can also be used in it for investigating the value and the mechanisms motivating customers to contribute, synthesize, and produce social intelligence and UGC.

Also, we invite the researchers to investigate the patterns of CRM systems and their uses across industries and countries to see how the characteristics of the business environment (national culture, the level of competitiveness, industry turbulence, etc.) affect the application and support CRM systems for customer knowledge creation processes. Given the importance of data sharing as a link between organizational learning and data quality, data quality mediates the sharing to performance relationship, therefore, future work is needed to expand the domain of data sharing, as this capability continues to challenge even the most sophisticated organizations. Lastly, customer data quality is multidimensional; more work is thus needed on the conceptual boundaries of customer data quality and its relevance in multiple contexts.

Investigating cross-cultural differences in organizational mechanisms designed for coping with customer information quality in CRM systems is a valuable research topic. Also, it is noted that both objective and subjective measures have pros and cons. Therefore, both measures should be used to evaluate firm performance in the future research. It is encouraged to adopt a longitudinal approach for better causality testing. It can also extend the proposed integrated model of CRM also by including other potential variables such as service and system quality, the analyzed mechanisms can be improved. Furthermore, it must clarify the impact of organizational incentives and top management support for customer information quality in CRM systems. Finally, the investigation on mobile CRM is still an interesting line of future research.

1.1 Key issues in online community cross-cultural research

Research into online communities is at an exploratory, developing and dynamic phase, with membership and activity of these communities increasing at a rapid rate (Big-boards.com, 2012; Hampton, Goulet, Rainie, & Purcell, 2011; Shin, 2010). The advent of online communities has had considerable global and cultural implications (Posey, Lowry, Roberts, & Ellis, 2010) and can often result in the blending of cultural values and norms (Grace-Farfaglia, Dekkers, Sundararajan, Peters, & Park, 2006). Following these developments, the purpose of cross-cultural analysis in the area of online community research is both varied and significant. It ranges from enhancing and increasing the generalizability of online community theory, to addressing methodological issues in online community research. On a more practical level, it allows for valuable insights in the design, moderation and facilitation of online communities by understanding how cultural differences influence community development. This section explains the growing importance of cross-cultural online community research, with a particular focus on theory, methodological issues, the informing of design decisions and providing insights into user behavior.