Cross-cultural Management: Issues And Solutions

Communication Gap among Employees

Discuss about the Intercultural Issues In the Business.

As the company has its base in Australia, there are various cross-cultural issues which appear in the management and affect the proper functioning of the company. Despite the fact that the teams follow accepted forms of arrangement, strategizing as well as operation, the team based organization techniques are still being evolved (Gelfand et al., 2017). One of these techniques include effective management of teams with huge cultural diversity. The current situation of the company is very risky where there are problems with language and communication gap, style and time of operating and diverse dominating influence.

Communication is one of the chief concerns that create problems in this cross cultural organization (Vogel et al., 2015). As the parent company is in Australia, the dominating language is obviously English. In other subsidiaries, the employees not always understand the meaning of all the words hence often leads to misinterpretation. In the trainings or meetings of the employees, the communication gap has led to conflict and lack of clarity among the team members as well as the relation among the mangers with the local employees. the company does not have international virtual team which helps to interact across the countries (Karin et al., 2014). Therefore, the company lacks essential collaborative measures among the teams.

Due to communication gap among the employees lead to information gap which is another problem area in this company. The method of sharing knowledge from top to bottom or horizontally is not taking pace in the organization (De Mooij, 2015). This is one of the chief reasons why the inter cultural issues are being formed and disturbing the proper functioning of the organization.

Decision making is one of the chief activity that helps the companies to proceed n the global markets. The international virtual teams working in different time zones lack mutually agreeable time band for direct communication hence there are issues of divergence and disagreement (DesAutels et al., 2015).

Working approaches and styles of different cultures are different in various counties. Some of these subsidiaries follow the working style of the Asians and some work like African culture. Some work cultures make people uncomfortable with the independence of their job and want to be guided and dominated by their superiors but some prefer independence of work (Bird & Mendenhall, 2016). Therefore, the managers face problems while working with the employees from different culture. Most of the teams of this organization have a mix of styles, where the individualistic team members can prove to be aggressive team player while some not-so-individualistic ones can merge into a team and contribute to the team process. The dominant groups within the cross cultural teams try to swing the decisions towards a direction with which they feel comfortable with (Jiang, Gollan and Brooks 2015). This have created a frustrating environment for the rest of the team.

Information Gap and Sharing Knowledge

As the cultures are different in different subsidiaries, the managers are being able to motivate the employees accordingly (Berry, 2015). As the company do not have any proper training method that can help the managers to learn to work with diverse cultures, they are not being able to respect the diversity of the team of employees. They do not possess experience to deal with the diverse team environment hence trying to implement the rules and policies of the parent company culture for which the employees of other subsidiaries are not ready (Tenhiälä et al. 2016). As the expectation of different cultural teams are different, the managers need to motivate as well as encourage them accordingly. Some cultures are restricted hence do not need holidays and other elements of enjoyment in their lives, hence these people are to be rewarded through want they want. These expectations are not similar among these cross-cultural employees. this is he reason why various issues are evolving in the organization.

As the company has been working cross-culturally, it needs to follow some rules to solve any kind of cross-cultural issues in the organization (Stahl et al., 2016). First of all, due to different cultural context, the communication challenges grow in the corporation. In such cases, the company needs to form effective communication strategies so that the sender of the messages and the receiver do not face any misunderstanding among themselves as they are from different cultural backgrounds. Despite the fact that this sometimes introduces certain amount of uncertainty and make the communication even more complex than before. Therefore, the employees of the organization must rely the basic understanding of the cultural diversity for effectively exchange cross-cultural communications.

Secondly, learning and creating awareness about the basics of cultures and the language of communication in different countries are necessary. Different cultures have different etiquette and different levels of understanding. Therefore, the methods of appropriate greetings as well as physical contacts must be taken into consideration. For example, the widely acceptable gesture like firm shake hand is acceptable aby all types of culture.

Thirdly, in order to increase more acceptability, the company needs to offer trainings to its employees so that they can understand the response style of people of different culture (French, 2015). These trainings will increase their patience practice to react against any behavior of a colleague with different cultural background.

Fourthly, the company needs to reward as well as recognize these managers or the employees which have successful experience in working with diverse cultures. These employees of the organizations can be utilized to convey their understanding so that the cross-cultural issues do not appear and disturb the function of the company.

Conflict in Decision Making

Fifthly, the company should recognize the special needs of the individuals on the team consisting diverse communities. For example, different cultures have different time and days of celebration hence need different holidays. Sometimes these people have different working hours (Mach & Baruch, 2015). Therefore, the authorities of the company need to be mindful of the different time zones and they must keep each and every employee aware as well as respectful in such differences in the organization.

Sixthly, the cross-cultural managers need to cultivate as well as demand mutual acceptance and understanding. The authorities need to explain to the team members that the parts of the team that works out of the Australia office, for example, will be working in the different times zones therefore, electronic communications can be used and return the phone calls will experience a delay and the members of Indian office will be observing different holidays.

Seventhly, it is absolutely best way for ensuring a successful team to create such a condition which set the team members for achieving the goals this is the reason why the multicultural teams need to have a specific structure so that the divest talents and skills can be utilized at its best.

Eighthly, the managers of the Australian office while working in other subsidiaries located in the other countries, need to indulge in making a deep personal friendship (Thomas & Peterson, 2017). Through this, many potential conflicts can be eased and the authorities with be able to develop trust and loyalty among the cross-cultural employees. By building individual connections as well as rapport, the authorities will be able to keep their employees motivated and encouraged to achieve their professional objectives.

Finally, by creating particular norms and mainya0ing them along with certain punitive measures, the authorities will be able to stop the cultural discrimination among the employees in the organization.

In case any und of differences are captured among the employees, the issues should be immediately taken into consideration so that further problems do not grow.

References:

Berry, J. W. (2015). Global psychology: implications for cross-cultural research and management. Cross Cultural Management, 22(3), 342-355.

Bird, A., & Mendenhall, M. E. (2016). From cross-cultural management to global leadership: Evolution and adaptation. Journal of World Business, 51(1), 115-126.

De Mooij, M. (2015). Cross-cultural research in international marketing: clearing up some of the confusion. International Marketing Review, 32(6), 646-662.

DesAutels, P., Berthon, P., Caruana, A., & Pitt, L. F. (2015). The impact of country connectedness and cultural values on the equity of a country’s workforce: A cross-country investigation. Cross Cultural Management, 22(1), 2-20.

French, R. (2015). Cross-cultural management in work organisations. Kogan Page Publishers.

Gelfand, M. J., Aycan, Z., Erez, M., & Leung, K. (2017). Cross-cultural industrial organizational psychology and organizational behavior: A hundred-year journey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 514.

Jiang, Z., Gollan, P.J. and Brooks, G., 2015. Moderation of doing and mastery orientations in relationships among justice, commitment, and trust: A cross-cultural perspective. Cross Cultural Management, 22(1), pp.42-67.

Karin Andreassi, J., Lawter, L., Brockerhoff, M., & J. Rutigliano, P. (2014). Cultural impact of human resource practices on job satisfaction: A global study across 48 countries. Cross cultural management, 21(1), 55-77.

Mach, M., & Baruch, Y. (2015). Team performance in cross cultural project teams: The moderated mediation role of consensus, heterogeneity, faultlines and trust. Cross Cultural Management, 22(3), 464-486.

Stahl, G. K., Miska, C., Lee, H. J., & De Luque, M. S. (2017). The upside of cultural differences: Towards a more balanced treatment of culture in cross-cultural management research. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, 24(1), 2-12.

Tenhiälä, A., Giluk, T. L., Kepes, S., Simón, C., Oh, I. S., & Kim, S. (2016). The Research?Practice gap in human resource management: A Cross?Cultural study. Human Resource Management, 55(2), 179-200.

Thomas, D. C., & Peterson, M. F. (2017). Cross-cultural management: Essential concepts. Sage Publications.

Vogel, R. M., Mitchell, M. S., Tepper, B. J., Restubog, S. L., Hu, C., Hua, W., & Huang, J. C. (2015). A cross?cultural examination of subordinates’ perceptions of and reactions to abusive supervision. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(5), 720-745.