Exploring Education Culture by Employing Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions to Evaluate the Effectiveness of the Current ERP Training Approach in Thailand

Abstract

ERP training is a critical success factor in ERP implementation. The current ERP training was largely ineffective and caused user resistance and ERP implementation failure. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the current ERP training approach can accommodate the cultural learning behaviors of end-users. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are employed to explain end-user dissatisfaction toward the current ERP training approach. The research is founded on the idea that different people learn in different ways, and cultural diversity may also influence how they learn and are taught. The current ERP training approach was design based on a Western learning culture and applied without concern for different learning cultures, which may be problematic. To achieve the objective, a qualitative method was adopted in this research. In-depth interviews were conducted with seventy-two end-users from twenty-two companies that had adopted an ERP system and had experienced ERP training in a Thai context during the implementation phase. The findings support the assumption by showing that the current ERP training approach did not accommodate Thai cultural learning behaviors in many areas. The content in this paper is a part of a comprehensive research to propose an ERP training framework to support the variety of end-user learning styles and different cultural learning behaviors.