When in Rome do as the Romans do: is it a reality of business life?

Every aspect of our scientific life is subdued to accelerated development and with the internationalisation of the economy the area of intercultural communication still possesses great potential for research. Both researhers and professionals emphasise the importance of knowledge of different cultures and they agree that globalisation has brought the growing trend to work ? virtually and/or face-to-face ? with people from different cultural backgrounds. The research to be discussed in the paper is a part of a complex research conducted in 2013. The main objective of the research is to help companies to work more effectively. The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate the results of a survey conducted with Hungarian professionals who are in business contact with partners with different cultural backgrounds. This paper focuses on demonstrating how culture influences behaviour in international setting where business partners have differing values, attitudes and norms. The data was collected with the aid of a research questionnaire (more then 300 respondents). The respondents were asked to answer close-ended and open-ended questions making choices among a set of alternatives focusing on their attitudes in several business situations. The data was entered into the SPSS programme and analysed using appropriate statistical methods. The findings reveal that companies seem to find it difficult to adapt their messages to suit different cultural groups but there are new approaches with promise the most success for communicating and working effectively in international business settings.