The Impact of Economic Development and National Culture on Management Consulting Expenditures: Evidence from Europe and North America

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12352
Date01 March 2020
Published date01 March 2020
The Impact of Economic Development and
National Culture on Management Consulting
Expenditures: Evidence from Europe and
North America
JÉRÔME BARTHÉLEMY
ESSEC Business School, 95021 Cergy Pontoise Cedex, FRANCE
This study examinesthe independent and joint effectof economic development and twonational culture dimensions
(performance orientation and uncertainty avoidance) on management consulting expenditures at the country level.
Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 21 European and North American countries over a 20-year period. Results
indicate that economic development and uncertainty avoidance are positively related to country-level management
consulting expenditures. Moreover, the relationship between economic development and management consulting
expenditures is stronger in countries high on uncertainty avoidance. On the other hand, performance orientation is
neither directly nor indirectly related to country-level management consulting expenditures.
Keywords: management consulting; economic development; national culture; GLOBE project
In an era of tumultuous organizational transformations,
of giant cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and of
decisive transitions in public and nonprofit organizations
as well as corporations, management consultants have
become ubiquitous agents of organizational change,
deeply embedded in all of the developed economies.
(McKenna, 2006: xi)
Introduction
Over the past decades, the use of managementconsultants
has become widespread. According to Berghand Gibbons
(2011) for instance, the worldwide revenue of the
management consulting industry has increased from $3
billion in 1980 to over $150 billion in 2005. In 2015, it
was estimated at $240 billion (https://www.consultancy.
uk/consulting-industry/consulting-market). While
management consulting is often presented as a pervasive
phenomenon (McKenna, 2006; Bergh and Gibbons,
2011), there is a lot of variability across countries. For
instance, the percentage of gross domestic product
(GDP) currently spent on management consulting is
0.97% in Germany and 0.29% in France (FEACO, 2018).
Why do management consulting expenditures vary so
much from one countryto another? Research on this topic
is sparse (Mohe,2008; Sturdy, 2011; Kipping and Wright,
2012; Sturdy and OMahoney, 2018). As Sturdy and
OMahoney (2018: 538) recently made clear: Despite
the growing literature on consulting, international
variation in management consultancy usage has yet to be
explored adequately. Indeed, national contexts more
generally are invariably ignored. Whilea few descriptive
reports suggest that national contexts shape the use of
management consultants (Kipping and Armbrüster,
1999; Kipping, 2001), no large-scale empirical study has
examined the drivers of management consulting
expenditures at the country level. The objective of this
study is to fill this gap by exploring the independent and
joint impact of economic development and national
culture on the use of management consultants. My
primary interest lies in examining the extent to which
cultural factors influence decisions to hire management
consultants. However, given the paucity of empirical
evidence on the relationship between the level of
economic development and the use of management
consultants in a country, I also propose to test this
relationship. I expect economic development to have a
Correspondence: Jérôme Barthélemy, ESSEC Business School, 95021
Cergy Pontoise Cedex, FRANCE, Tel.: +33.1.34.43.31.98. E-mail
barthelemy@essec.edu
DOI: 10.1111/emre.12352
©2019 European Academy of Management
European Management Review, Vol. 17, (2020)
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