Dr. Niedenführ holds Workshop at the TSRG Summer School 2026: Transcultural Management and Asian Business Culture
As part of the TSRG Summer School 2026, Dr. Matthias Niedenführ, Senior Research Fellow at LEIZ, has led a workshop on “Transcultural Management and Asian Business Culture”. Participants came from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, South Africa, Nigeria, China, and Vietnam.
Rather than treating transcultural competence as a fixed skill, Dr. Niedenführ framed it as a developmental process that unfolds over time. Drawing on Bennett’s Intercultural Development Inventory, participants traced how individuals move from ethnocentric views toward ethnorelativism. Heterogeneous teams have shown that they realize their potential only when cultural differences are actively understood and integrated.
East Asian management approaches have also taken a central place in the workshop. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism fundamentally shape leadership, organizational structures, and strategic thinking across the region. Participants identified that what often reads as an inefficiency, such as consensus-building in Japan, is in practice an alternative rationality that builds long-term trust and sustainability.
Contributions from participants across Africa, Asia, and Europe have reinforced that there is no universal management model. Hybrid approaches that combine local logics, among them Ubuntu, relational leadership, and Western performance orientation, offer more grounded solutions than applying a single framework across contexts.
