Essay: Literature Review On Cross Cultural Management." (50 Characters)

Write a Literature review on Cross cultural management.

Cross cultural management is one of the important factors that need to be managed as the businesses are grown globally. In this literature review we will map the changing context of culture and the evolving phenomena that are available to provide global leadership. Cross cultural management refers to managing the differences among an individual due to different cultures. While analysing cross cultural management, global leadership plays an important role.

In a business there are employees from entirely different culture and background. In order to make sure that businesses have high functioning the diversity issue need to be resolved. To ensure an effective working environment a sustainable workplace is needed that could be achieved by proper cultural management. The key reason of the issue is every individual have different customs and different communication styles, due to these differences there are chances of conflicts (Thomas and Peterson, 2017). Thus to minimize these conflicts cross cultural management is needed.

Culture is an important component of a business and affects the strategies of a business. Culture of a business affects the decision making power. This helps in providing a right direction to the business in terms of conducting meetings, work placements or internships. Business culture depends upon the behaviour and ethics of employees. In a business people come from different countries and each country has different etiquettes thus it is necessary make sure that these difference don’t affect the efficiency of the business (Karin Andreassi, et. al, 2014). Culture and business impact the global ethics of an organisation. The culture and values followed by an individual can underestimate the business environment. Business is same everywhere the only difference is culture, which refers to the overall behaviour from how a person eat to how a person communicate.

According to (Bird and Mendenhall, 2016) , culture is the set of defined values, mind-sets and practices of a group of people. It includes the rules and perception that are followed by specific group. In a business it is important to have cultural awareness among individual this is done by understanding the cultural values of different religion. It doesn’t mean accepting the customs of people from different culture it’s just understanding their mind set to avoid future clashes. Understanding the customs help in interacting with the members from different groups easily. In a business different cultures are growing day by day, but technology and media has somewhere helped in providing glimpse about other cultures. This fluidity helps in removing the bifurcation as it enable an individual to understand the customs in a better way.

Literature Review

In the views of (French, 2015), it is important to maintain culture and business at workplace to avoid the barriers regarding different culture. Culture can be seen as a fuzzy set of assumptions regarding the values and orientations of one’s belief. Various policies and procedures are defined for each member to know the meaning of others behaviour.  For any organisations mangers need to look how to deal with people from different culture. If the policies are developed in a right manner the growth of the business would be rapid. In the research it was found that business culture is developed at three different levels that are various artefacts, values and assumptions. In business artefacts covers the dress sense of a person their statement and perception regarding their rituals. Values refer to understanding how and why they behave in a certain way. Additionally, assumptions vary from one person to person and the overall culture of business is displayed through combination of these three features.

According to the study of article, it can be stated that business structure need to be managed by managers in a controlled manner to spread the cultural awareness. Cultural consequences triggers the organisational behaviour as greater level of cultural differences have negative impact on the business since it  decreases the reputation of company and overall business for the long run (Pratt, 2004) . A cultural error may lead to loss of employees which generates pressure in the business.

In the views of (Adler, Doktor and Redding, 2010), cultural differences affect business in various ways. Especially while building the business with other country members the gestures should be followed according to their customs to get customers. For example, in some countries speaking at louder pitch is just a normal gesture whereas in country like Japan people usually speak at a low pitch. Thus these difference need to be taken care to build a strong relationship with the customers. The main issue of different culture in business is due to globalization of business. It is important to deal with the cultural issues in a business; this could be done by using technology (Watkins, 2010) . Cultural difference also affects the availability of an employee in an organisation due to difference in time zone.

According to (Krishna, Sahay and Walsham, 2014) , culture and business are linked to each other.  Style of communication, the way they interact with people with different culture completely varies from one country to other. It is very important to link the culture perceptive with the business to remove the obligations among people due to speaking habits, postures or some other factors. For resolving these issues every business undertakes various policies like equality among employees, which make sure that every employee is treated equally by ignoring their custom value. An action plan or agenda with a clear cut vision is used for business meetings to avoid conflicts (Akhtar, Lodhi & Khan, 2016). Thus it can be concluded that the culture and business are linked to each other.

Culture and Communication

Culture and communication are two separate terms but are closely related to each other and they play an important role in gaining knowledge about the differences.  Cross cultural communication is important for every company to grow globally. At ant place there exist group of people from diverse culture (Rising and García-carbonell, 2018). Additionally communication is the only way through which a person shares their thoughts and ideas. Therefore, it is very important to understand different languages for smooth connection (Schmiedel, vom Brocke and Recker, 2015). Considering the scenario at work place if every employee is communicating in their native language in one will be able to understand the perspective of each other. Thus it is very important to create plans to avoid the conflicts; this could be done by organising training sessions that would help them to learn common language that could be understood by everyone.

According to the article it can be stated that there are different groups all following distinct cultures including different language patterns. There exists a complex relation between the culture and communication. Communication is a way by which an individual interact but varies according to the culture. For example, when a group of people meet for the first time, every individual will follow different behavioural pattern (Ivanova-Gongne, 2015). While they communicate with each other cultural characteristics acts like a hindrance as they are not aware about the customs of other person. It is difficult at initial meet but later this meet would be helpful to shape the communication by interacting through different customers.

In the views of (Leach, 2016), the culture and communication are related to each other and are important aspect to deal with the challenges of multinational communication.  The intercultural communication is essential not just because of globalization but due to the workforce which is growing domestically but with diverse culture. It is important in decision making power as the people from same culture have mostly same point of view (Murphy,Edward , Gordon & Anderson, 2004) . On the other hand, two people belonging to different culture have different perspective that can help to extent the business in all direction (Goman, 2015). Communication and culture also affect the level of context that need to be delivered while communicating. Some countries believe in delivering high context whereas some believe in just delivering explicit knowledge.

In the opinion of (Ang, 2010), the culture and commination together are important to groom a person. Culture and communication are defined in many ways and these concepts are intimately linked with every human. Cculture has become a reason of creating separate communities which in turn helps in allowing intercultural communication (Gijon-nogueron,  et. al, 2014) . To avoid conflicts in intercultural communication proper strategies need to be defined that helps in understanding different cultures (Stahl and Tung, 2015). Knowing about different customs will make communication easy and it also enhances an individual to adapt to new cultures and relations. Additionally it also builds a bridge between different cultures

Conclusion

It can be concluded from this report that it is important for people to know the way to interact with people from different culture. From the research I completely agree that cross cultural management is not limited to business or managers but it also covers the areas where there are people from different culture. It is necessary to remove the confusion regarding different culture to have an effective communication. Therefore it is important to learn about different cultures to remove the diversity at workplace. For a business where employees belong to different backgrounds training session need to be organised to remove conflicts and have a positive environment at the workplace. A healthy business culture values each member in the organization regardless of the job duties, which results in employees working together as a team which would be beneficial for company’s growth.

References

Adler, N.J., Doktor, R. and Redding, S.G. (2010) From the Atlantic to the Pacific century: Cross-cultural management reviewed. Journal of management, 12(2), pp.295-318.

Akhtar, F., Lodhi, S. A., & Khan, S. S. (2016). Assessing the influence of the cultural perspective on cross cultural conflict: An analysis of cultural environment. Pakistan Journal of Commerce and Social Sciences, 10(1), 84-103. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1833035655?accountid=30552

Ang, I. (2010) Culture and communication: Towards an ethnographic critique of media consumption in the transnational media system. European journal of communication, 5(2), pp.239-260.

Bird, A. and Mendenhall, M.E. (2016) From cross-cultural management to global leadership: Evolution and adaptation. Journal of World Business, 51(1), pp.115-126.French, R. (2015) Cross-cultural management in work organisations. Kogan Page Publishers.

Gijon-nogueron, G., Ndosi, M., Luque-suarez, A., Alcacer-pitarch, B., Munuera, P.V., Garrow, A., & Redmond, A. C. (2014). Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the manchester foot pain and disability index into spanish.Quality of Life Research, 23(2), 571-9. doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11136-013-0507-5

Goman, C. (2015). Communicating Across Cultures. Available from https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/business-communication/communicating-across-cultures Accessed on 20 April 2018.

Ivanova-Gongne, M. (2015) Culture in business relationship interaction: an individual perspective. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 30(5), pp.608-615.Karin Andreassi, J., Lawter, L., Brockerhoff, M. and J. Rutigliano, P. (2014) Cultural impact of human resource practices on job satisfaction: A global study across 48 countries. Cross cultural management, 21(1), pp.55-77.Krishna, S., Sahay, S. and Walsham, G. (2014) Managing cross-cultural issues in global software outsourcing. Communications of the ACM, 47(4), pp.62-66.Leach, E. (2016) Culture and Communication: the logic by which symbols are connected. An introduction to the use of structuralist analysis in social anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Murphy,Edward F.,,Jr, Gordon, J. D., & Anderson, T. L. (2004). Cross-cultural, cross-cultural age and cross-cultural generational differences in values between the united states and japan. Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship, 9(1), 21-48. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/203906732?accountid=30552

Pratt, A. K. (2004). Cross-cultural management, volume 1: The theory of culture / cross-cultural management, volume 2: Managing cultural differences. Personnel Psychology, 57(3), 795-798. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/220135878?accountid=30552

Rising, B. and García-carbonell, A. (2018). CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION. Available from https://www.upv.es/diaal/publicaciones/rising1.pdf Accessed on 20 April 2018.

Schmiedel, T., vom Brocke, J. and Recker, J. (2015) Culture in business process management: how cultural values determine BPM success. In Handbook on Business Process Management 2 (pp. 649-663). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.Stahl, G.K. and Tung, R.L. (2015) Towards a more balanced treatment of culture in international business studies: The need for positive cross-cultural scholarship. Journal of International Business Studies, 46(4), pp.391-414.Thomas, D.C. and Peterson, M.F ( 2017) Cross-cultural management: Essential concepts. Sage Publications.

Watkins, L. (2010). The cross-cultural appropriateness of survey-based value(s) research. International Marketing Review, 27(6), 694-716. doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1108/0265133101108829