Human resource policies involving hiring practices, performance appraisal, and
employee benefits that had been developed in the Netherlands were not necessarily
well received by Royal Ahold’s new managers and employees in Asia, Latin America,
and South America. Likewise, because grocery shopping is a ritual signifi cantly influenced by longstanding cultural norms across the globe, company offi cials found that customers in new markets often did not appreciate and sometimes fl atly rejected the “Dutch” way of organizing and managing a grocery store. These and related problems
convinced Royal Ahold’s executives that the best strategy to use in managing their
foreign grocery chains was to allow most major decisions to be made by the management
personnel of those chains who were typically retained following an acquisition.