Asian Selling Game

European nations are attempting to standardize business across the community despite deep cultural divides. CULTURAL IMPACT ON EUROPEAN STAFFING DECISIONS IN SALES MANAGEMENT (PDF) presents results from a research conducted on the captioned issue.

"Our study set out to examine the influence of regional culture on sales force recruitment and promotion decisions. We believe this is an important and under-researched area within the sales force and human resource management area. It will doubtlessly become a more important issue as sales forces are deployed cross nationally or globally with the implementation of various free trade agreements (e.g., NAFTA, ASEAN, MERCUR, and the EEC) and in Europe, the common money. Researchers have called on sales organizations to focus more on their staffing policies because they are critical to long-term success (e.g., Churchill et al. 2000, p. 354). We hope our research contributes to the field by providing empirical support for differences between countries in terms of recruitment and promotion decisions. Additionally we believe this study offers insight into the type of criteria used by managers to make staffing decisions."

The cultural divide between Asia and Western Culture where much of the Best Practices in Sales and Sales management emanates is of course deeper than between EU nations. The findings from this study would certainly suggest that for Western best practices to work effectively in Asia, it will have to be applied with great flexibility.