Cross-cultural organizational psychology: an African perspective.

Africa has been ignored for many years by western organizational psychology scholars, and is often omitted even from cross-cultural texts. Aspects that impinge on the fundaments of human interaction, and often taking a back seat in organizational psychology, are highly evident when studying organizational behavior in Africa. Geopolitical dynamics cannot be ignored, and raise important questions concerning cross-cultural power dynamics and the nature of knowledge in organizations and the process and ethicality of knowledge transfer. Similarly, questions of cultural identity are complex among processes of westernization, cosmopolitanization, urbanization, inter-marriage, bi-culturalism, and fundamentally the different levels of cross-cultural interaction involved. This chapter sets out to explore common issues in cross-cultural organizational psychology, such as leadership and management, decision-making and motivation, drawing on what can be learned from studying organizations and human processes in Africa.