CROSS CULTURE

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Cross Culture Management



Cross Culture Management

Introduction

Culture of the whole world is changing dynamically, and so is the case with the corporate world. Culture in simple terms is known as a way things are conducted in an environment which consists of values, beliefs, language, rituals, norms, customs and religion. Managers are responsible for enforcing the culture. Cross Culture as the name suggests involves the mix and match of employees from diverse backgrounds so that they can learn the language, norms, rituals that are embedded in an organisation systems and communicated effectively with their colleagues so as to achieve a collective goal efficiently and effectively. Cross cultural management is an important managerial area for any organization and plays a vital role in the success of an organisation. Management is simply getting things done with the help of other people and is an important area to any organization as it has many dimensions.

Cultural intelligence comes in when emotional intelligence leaves. “Cultural intelligence determines a person ability to adjust to new cultures. Cultural intelligence can be defined as a person ability, to successfully adapt to new cultural settings, that is to unfamiliar settings attributable to cultural context” (TAN, 2004, pp.21).

On the part of humans, it is also very essential to understand the culture of the place where they are working as this will help them develop. If an organization has good working relationship between its employees it can be assumed that the people working there are culturally talented, and it also reflects the soundness of the functioning of the systems and processes of that particular company and that these systems have been able to shape up the human resource function with their culture and are ready to achieve their mission. Not understanding a culture can lead to a cultural shock which can result in isolation, worry, helplessness, non-performance and many more problems to the employee which are harmful aspect to both the employer as well as employee.

Literature Review & Analysis

All successful organizations in the world work very hard on cross cultures and have different views on it. Tan, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore researched and found out that hiring culturally intelligent or culturally talented people provides competitive advantage to the transnational corporations. Not only the colleagues but the customers of the company are dealt effectively. Lufthansa believes these culturally intelligent people are an asset to them in times of crisis whereas Lloyds consider these people will help them with gaining momentum locally (TAN, 2004, p.21).

A business school student Diaconu who visited Turkey on an internship found out that cultural intelligence and cultural awareness are successful business approaches. She also found out that there is an increasing shift towards western corporate cultures in all big companies in, Turkey (Diaconu, 2012, pp.1-2).

Triandis, professor of psychology at University of Illinois suggests that extremely important quality that one must possess to achieve cultural intelligence is to avoid judgement. Once most of, the information is available then one can ...