That leader is hard to beat: why words matter in international qualitative research

In our highly interconnected global economy, cultural heterogeneity across regions and countries has a significant impact on management practices in organisations. This has prompted researchers to design and assess studies involving multi-culture or multi-countries samples to either gain a deeper understanding of culture or establish generalisability of their findings. We believe that cultural heterogeneity may hinder a cross-culture study due to deep inherent underlying differences in participants from different cultures. The impact of culture heterogeneity amplifies especially in qualitative studies, where participants are engaged in interviews. Thus, in this paper we investigate the differential effects of culture on the phenomenon of priming during qualitative interviews. Utilising a qualitative analysis of responses to open ended questions from a sample of US and Chinese managers, two languages with very different etymological, cultural and historical roots, we find that US and Chinese managers conceptualise various business terminology somewhat differently, therefore suggesting a difference in how priming impacts qualitative research conducted across those two samples. Our findings have significant implications for researchers and practitioners seeking to engage in multicultural work environments.