Vijesh, JainSilva, Susana Costa e2017-08-042017-08-042016VIJESH, Jain; SILVA, Susana Costa e - Nature, variations and preferences in ‘level of comfort’ among employees with different national background. In 4th Pan IMM World Conference, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, 13-15h December, 2016. 9 p.http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/22780Purpose and hypothesis Cultural ethos and preferences varies a lot not only among continents but also among countries. This brings us to the concept of „national culture‟ (Hofstede, 1980, 1983, 1984). National culture has to do with differences among national cultural background of individuals in their societal or business environment. The concept has also to do with the way those manifested differences may influence business decisions at the international level. National culture can be interpreted as “a common frame of reference or logic by which members of a society view organizations, the environment, and their relations to one another.” (Geletkanycz 1997, p. 617). According to most authors of cultural studies, these differences emerges from several factors such as ethnical differences, ethical differences, geographical differences, moral differences, historical differences, political differences, linguistic differences and religious differences. (Matondo, JPM, 2012). In business environment, during communication between persons of different national cultural backgrounds, such differences can play an important role which may manifest into certain degree of friction, discomfort and inability to appreciate „these differences and different ways of thinking of persons of foreign cultures‟ (Shenkar and Zeira, 1992, p. 55-75), potentially affecting the performance of the project teams (Shenkar, 2001, p. 519). This phenomenon leads us to the concept of „level of comfort with foreign cultures‟. Prime purpose of this study is to investigate the possible differences in „level of comfort‟ among people coming from different national backgrounds in multinational workplaces in terms of national cultural preferences of individual employees. In other words this paper studies the differences in „level of comfort‟ among different cultural pairs working together at multinational enterprises in India or abroad.engconference object