Culture is a very complex construct. It has been studied in many fields, including anthropology, psychology, sociology, and management. Each of these fields has used its own methodology and terminology, which makes an already complex construct much more difficult even to specialists. Despite its complexity or possibly because of it, often, it has been defined and operationalized simplistically (Taras et al., 2009: 358).

We could study culture in two major approaches, etic or emic (Gannon, 2009). The etic approach enables researchers to compare cultures. Hofstede (2001), House et al. (2004) and their followers have used etic or cultural-general approaches. This line of research has dominated the field of cultural studies. The emic method or culture-specific (e.g. Gannon, 2004, 2009; Gannon and Pillai, 2009; Montague and Morais, 1975; Nielsen and Mariotto, 2005/2006) has received less attention.

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