CROSS CULTURAL ASSIGNMENT.

Cross cultural Assignment.

Cross cultural Assignment.

Task 1

As business nowadays becomes more global, Human Resource Management becomes a bigger and more interesting issues for all organizations. The differences between each countries in terms of cultures, economics, legislation, or even environment have both direct and indirect influence to the owners, managers, employees, and other people related to the company. These influences cover the areas of Human Resource activities, which are recruitment and selection, training and development, and performance and reward management.

Recruitment is a crucial area of any business. However, ensuring you are hiring the best people to help develop and grow a business is more complicated in such an internationalized and multicultural environment. Stereotypes, ignorance, assumptions and general lack of cross cultural competencies can mean that the right people may not always be given the opportunities they deserve. Equipping staff with the skills to be able to identify and manage cross cultural differences in interviews is vital. For a company with global ambitions, success in the next twenty years will stem from successful joint ventures and alliances.

But while it is a simple matter to draw lines across the globe in the manner of the nineteenth century colonial powers and to devise a Concert, an Atlas, or a Unisource, there is no guarantee that such alliances will thrive - or even endure. Where once a global company such as Coca-Cola simply sold its product or imposed a taste and multinationals geared the names or colours of identical products to the results of market research, the survival of transnational will depend on flexibility in managing cultural diversity.

Primarily, this entails the successful management of a multi-cultural workforce in a global context. But it also means being able to vary services across cultures: not simple marketing plays imposed from outside, but an understanding of how culture drives differences from within. A simple example of this is the way in which different cultures use the phone: an American walks into his appartment after a week away and switches on the answerphone; an Italian rings his mother. One requires an add-on device; the other needs single number dialling and favoured-number discounts. These differences may appear trivial, but they are profoundly culture-driven.

The development of genuinely transnational business organizations therefore requires managerial approaches and systems which allow for variations deriving from such diversity. This might be "national" cultural diversity between nations, races or ethnic groups (eg. in a two-nation joint-venture), intra-national diversity involving the range of cultures within a single nation (eg. in the USA), or internal cultural diversity where managers need to deal with foreign-owned transnational companies in their own country (eg. a British manager dealing with a Korean manufacturer in the UK). All this is well known, and there are so far a lot of books on the management of cultural diversity. But the problems go deeper than is often appreciated: it is not simply a matter of minding manners or learning to deal with varying attitudes to ...