How To Successfully Negotiate Across Cultures And The Importance Of Multicultural Competence For Managerial Success

1) How could Arun have avoided the culture clash that resulted in the failure of his negotiation and his not getting the job? What advice would you have given to Arun to conduct a successful negotiation?

2) Key organizational and managerial decisions on problems identified. 

3) Recommendations for actions and improvement. 

4) Why is multicultural competence so important for managerial and corporate success? Explain. 

Avoiding Culture Clashes in Negotiations

1. The given case study is about an Indian born Arun Gupta who was trained as professional accountant in United Kingdom (UK). As Arun adjusted well with UK’s culture, he initially pursued his professional carrierthere and after gaining several years of experiencein accounting field, he decided to seek for job opportunities in some other country, preferably in South Korea, due to his personal reasons and interest.He identified the requirement job position of accounting in a Korean company in Busan and then applied for that job.In response to application, the company offered him the position of accountant and ensued negotiations for salary, other benefits and work conditions.However, when he physically visited the company,he discovered that the offered job position was quite different from his expectation and there was mismatch of expectation between him and company authority.The authority clearly pointed and suggested Arun that he was to too aggressive and too forward and had not presented proper gratitude for considering his application to the company. In addition, from his negotiation attitude, the authority realised that he was not suitable for the job, as he do not show any respect or trust from the company job (Budde-Sung, A., 2013). Consequently, Arun could not get the job that he applied because of his failed negotiation with company authority due to culture clash. However, this negotiation would have been successful and he would have got the job if he could have avoided the culture clash by implementing the following principles and techniques (Lee, Adair, and Seo 2013).

• Arun must have consulted, discussed and taken information from his girlfriend about the Korean work culture, personal culture, and lifestyle and so on. By doing that, he would have learnt much about the Korean culture.
• Prior to conducting negotiation with the company, he would have taken advice and suggestion about how to perform negotiation while showing or maintain respect for cultural differences as showing disrespect to cultural differences results in culture clashes.
• He should have been aware of the situation about how the Korean would perceive his culture.
• He must have taken initiation to bridge the gap among cultures. Though bridging the cultural divide is difficult to follow. However, with the appropriate strategies, the negotiation can be made effective and successful.

It is advisable that Arun must have followed the below techniques to conduct a successful negotiation. Before applying for a job change in another country, he must have performed appropriate homework for planning his negotiation strategy. He must have realised that proper and successful negotiation can help him in getting a new job in a reputed company as well as negotiation skills can lead him to advance in his career within the company.                                                           

2. Essential organizational and managerial decisions on identified problems

In the given case study it is stated that Arun did not get the applied job due to his extremely egocentric attitude as well as personality style and his inability to properly address the company authority as well as to work with team. In addition to these individual issues, there are issues of culture clash. As these can be identified as problems, so the essential organization and managerial decisions on the problems can be stated as follows (Lee Marks, Mirvis and Ashkenas 2014).

• The company authority and the management must provide time to get to know each team member of a cross-cultural team. The management must encourage their team members to share their knowledge, story, experience, skills and journey so that team bonding can be formed.
• Some team members may not be loyal or fully dedicated to the company due to their feeling of being misunderstood and ill managed. However, this can be avoided by recognizing the team members’ multicultural skills from the management end.
• The management must provide its team members full discretion to access information and resources so that tasks can be efficiently finished.
• The organization and management must arrange for opportunities so that each team member can know other member’s cultural differences.

3. Recommendations for actions and improvement

• In order to work and live in another culture one needs to actively exert himself or herself to develop understanding of the cross culture and he or she must change his or her way of thinking, feeling and behaving. This approach is very effective and it is referred as informal on-the job training. The successfulness of this approach depends on the knowledge, experience and personality of the individual (Martin and Nakayama 2013).
• The team leader must create and maintain clear norms for every member of the cross-cultural team. After creation of norms every team members must stick to these established standards, irrespective of whatever their personal default is (Glass and Westmont 2014).
• Personal connections among team members needs to be developed to ease out potential conflicts and disagreement.
• By understanding the cultural perspectives, the team leader must immediately address the conflict that may occur in cross culture team.
• Every team member must manage his/her attitude towards the culture instead of always loving the culture, which implies that each member must checks his /her reaction to values, and customs that is quite different from their own culture.
• In spite of having trained cross cultural communication and effective negotiation skills, there are chances of getting cultural surprises which may puzzle the team member must try to cope with these surprises and ignore any reactionary behaviour.

Human capital (HC) is defined as the combination of abilities, competencies, skills and knowledge that a human being acquire throughout his/her life and it is developed by engaging in various forms of training, informal and formal learning. HC is used as a productive activity for the welfare of individuals or organizations or society. HC usage improves the performance level of individual, enhances the organization’s productivity level and provides economic development of a nation (Johnson, Schnatterly and Hill 2013).

The given overview of BRIC addresses the role of HC development in the economic growth of BRIC. BRIC or Big Four or BRIC countries stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China

The overview depicts the human development indicator in BRIC population, education indicator under different parameters. The overview depicts the percentage of contribution in the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as well as sustainability. In general, the overview list the factors and issues that result in the growth of middle class in emerging economies. All those factors and issues can helps in reorganizing and improving the worldwide financial system. However, this approach of the community of international business is not sufficient to recover from the striking global economic and financial crisis. Thus, the community needs to understand and analyse the cultural differences and the significance of cross-cultural competence. In the dynamic global business environment of the world, capitalization of multicultural competence for organization has been a major area of focus for its effective global leadership. Multicultural competence implies the required personal attributes or traits, skills and knowledge for living and working in a diverse world (Inman and Ladany 2014). Development of multicultural competence involves multicultural awareness, multicultural knowledge and multicultural skills.

1) Multicultural awareness deals with the following (Awang-Shuib, Sahari and Ali 2017).

• Awareness of one’s assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, biases, limitations, abilities, values as well as awareness of self, the relationship and other;
• Understanding or accepting one’s own heritage and culture.

2) Multicultural knowledge deals with the following (Ratts et al. 2016).

• Particular information about culture of others’;
• Knowledge about how behaviours, feelings, interventions and attitudes are affected by social identifications such as culture, race and other such things.

3) Multicultural skills deals with the following (Dusi, Messetti and Steinbach 2014).

• Ability to resolve, manage and tolerate as well as to recover from cultural errors;
• Ability of constructing proper interventions, integrating learning in new situations and deconstruction of one’s core beliefs and assumptions.

All the above awareness, skills and knowledge can improve behaviours as well as performance tasks such as conflict resolution, cross-cultural communication, critical thinking, and leadership skills of a multicultural team, which can lead to the overall growth of the organization

References:

Awang-Shuib, A.R., Sahari, S.H. and Ali, A.J., 2017. Multicultural awareness and urban communities: Validating a multicultural awareness scale. Journal of Asian Behavioural Studies, 2(5), pp.45-55.

Budde-Sung, A., 2013. Dilemmas in working across cultures: Arun in a conundrum. Dynamics of International Business: Asia-Pacific Business Cases, p.145.

Dusi, P., Messetti, G. and Steinbach, M., 2014. Skills, attitudes, relational abilities & reflexivity: competences for a multicultural society. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 112, pp.538-547.

Glass, C.R. and Westmont, C.M., 2014. Comparative effects of belongingness on the academic success and cross-cultural interactions of domestic and international students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 38, pp.106-119.

Inman, A.G. and Ladany, N., 2014. Multicultural competencies in psychotherapy supervision. Ariel, 128, pp.77-115.

Johnson, S.G., Schnatterly, K. and Hill, A.D., 2013. Board composition beyond independence: Social capital, human capital, and demographics. Journal of management, 39(1), pp.232-262.

Lee Marks, M., Mirvis, P. and Ashkenas, R., 2014. Making the most of culture clash in M&A. Leader to leader, 2014(71), pp.45-53.

Lee, S., Adair, W.L. and Seo, S.J., 2013. Cultural perspective taking in cross-cultural negotiation. Group Decision and Negotiation, 22(3), pp.389-405.

Martin, J.N. and Nakayama, T.K., 2013. Intercultural communication in contexts. New York: NY: McGraw-Hill.

Ratts, M.J., Singh, A.A., Nassar?McMillan, S., Butler, S.K. and McCullough, J.R., 2016. Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies: Guidelines for the counseling profession. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 44(1), pp.28-48.