Fons Trompenaars

Management consultant

• Born: 1953
• Place of Birth: Amsterdam, Netherlands

• Education: Free University of Amsterdam; Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
• Significance: An organizational theorist, Fons Trompenaars developed the Trompenaars model of national culture differences, a framework used in the business world to help inform cross-cultural communication.

Background

Alfonsus "Fons" Trompenaars was born in 1953 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to a Dutch father and a French mother, which attuned him to cultural differences from an early age. He attended Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Free University of Amsterdam) beginning in 1971 and earned a master’s degree in business economics from there in 1978. He then moved to the United States to attend the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Though Wharton is primarily known for its master of business administration (MBA) program, Trompenaars enrolled in a doctorate program and earned a PhD in social systems sciences in 1982. He has cited his PhD supervisor at Wharton, Hasan Ozbekhan, as the person who most influenced his later thinking about cross-cultural issues.

After college, he took a job at Royal Dutch Shell’s human resources division in 1982. Over the next nine years, he worked for Shell in nine different countries, exposing him to cultural differences both trivial and significant and the ways in which they affected how people conduct business and communicate in professional contexts. While working for Shell, he met Charles Hampden-Turner, a Harvard-educated British professor who worked for Shell as a consultant.

In the mid-1980s, Trompenaars was interviewed for Shell Magazine about his research on cross-cultural differences. In response, he received numerous inquiries from other companies asking him to give a lecture on the topic. He subsequently discovered his love of public speaking, and between 1987 and 1989, he worked part-time for Shell while lecturing.

Life’s Work

In 1989, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner founded the Center for International Business Studies, which provided training services (and later consulting) to private- and public-sector companies and groups in cultural awareness and competence. The company later became a consulting firm named Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (THT).

Cross-cultural relations became a more popular topic in the 1980s due to numerous factors, including the growth of international trade and globalization, the growing number of companies doing business in multiple countries, and the emergence of new markets after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. This provided the motive for Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner to form their own company; the demand for an informed knowledge base in cross-cultural communications and cultural competence in business was high enough that the shift from training services to consultancy came quickly. The company’s early work focused on more country-specific concerns, drawing on the partners’ experiences working in other countries, often geared toward helping expatriates acculturate to new business environments. In the 1990s, the company embraced broader concerns, which led to the formation of Trompenaars’s model of national culture differences.

The model bears Trompenaars’s name—the elder Hampden-Turner having provided guidance in the development of the theory and its publication. It began with a survey of more than eight thousand individuals (managers and employees) from forty-three countries, from which Trompenaars derived a model demonstrating "dimensions" of culture in order to illustrate the ways in which national cultures differ from one another. Each dimension is articulated as a pair of polar opposites, five of which deal with interpersonal interactions, one of which deals with time, and one of which concerns the spatial environment.

These dimensions include universalism versus particularism (are rules universal or modified according to circumstance?), individualism versus communitarianism (do people consider themselves individuals or members of a group?), neutral versus emotional (do people conduct themselves with stoicism, as in the United Kingdom and Japan, or display their more emotions openly, as in Spain and Italy?), specific versus diffuse (do people tend to work in a large space shared with others or in a small space shared only with close associates?), and achievement versus ascription (does status come from what people have achieved or from the value ascribed to them from specific individuals such as elders or senior colleagues?). All these dimensions describe the ways people interact with one another. Sequential versus synchronic describes whether people expect to perform tasks in sequence or to be assigned several things to do at once. Internal versus external control describes an employee’s relationship to the work environment. In many parts of the world, these cross-cultural differences had caused communication problems and increased tensions in many businesses, particularly following mergers and acquisitions. In the United States, for instance, by the 1980s there was a small cottage industry in books on Japanese business culture aimed at the management world.

In 1991, the American Society for Training and Development (now the Association for Talent Development) awarded Trompenaars the International Professional Practice Area Research Award. Business magazine named him one of the top five management consultants in 1999. As the field of leadership studies developed in the late twentieth century, his model found new applications. He has coauthored several books on the topic of cross-cultural issues in business, including Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business (1997), which has been translated into nine languages, and Managing People across Cultures (2004). Other titles include Servant-Leadership Across Cultures: Harnessing the Strengths of the World's Most Powerful Management Philosophy (2009) with Ed Voerman and 100+ Management Models: How to Understand and Apply the World's Most Powerful Business Tools (2015) with Piet Hein Coebergh. He also co-authored several titles in the New Business Culture Series, including New Approaches to Flexible Working and New Approaches to Recruitment and Selection, both with Peter Woolliams and published in 2024.

Impact

Trompenaars’s model promotes transcultural competence, in which cultural diversity within a business is not seen as an obstacle but as a valuable resource that emphasizes the common characteristics across cultures rather than the differences. Much of this shift involved abandoning what Trompenaars called the "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" approach. He has argued that mimicry is not the same as cultural competence, nor is it practical for businesses or individuals expecting to operate in numerous countries and cultures. Trompenaars’s model defines four elements of transcultural competence: recognition of the dilemma, respect for all opinions, reconciliation in reaching a compromise that attempts to accommodate different opinions and approaches, and realization that translates the compromise into actual behavior and results.

Bibliography

Hampden-Turner, Charles, and Fons Trompenaars. Nine Visions of Capitalism. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2015. Print.

Hofstede, Geert, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014. Print.

Meyer, Erin. The Culture Map: Breaking through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014. Print.

Trompenaars, Fons. "Culture Club: An Interview with Fons Trompenaars." Interview by George Bickerstaffe. Business Strategy Review 13.1 (2002): 31–35, doi.org/10.1111/1467-8616.00199. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

Trompenaars, Fons. Interview. T+D 1 Aug. 2011: 62–63. Print.

Trompenaars, Fons, and Charles Hampden-Turner. Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Print.

Trompenaars, Fons, and Peter Woolliams. Business across Cultures. New York: Capstone, 2004. Print.