Cross Cultural Communication and Business Management - Term Paper Example

Running Head: CROSS CULTURAL COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT Cross Cultural Communication and Business Management 'National Culture is of virtually no significance in relation to the communication skills needed by the modern international manager’ Introduction Cross-cultural effective communication enhanced people's ability to deal with conflicts that arise within multicultural teams. To ensure success in business, many organizations used cross-cultural communication to improve their manager's cross- cultural effectiveness and enhance their communication skills. This essay has discussed about how important about cross-cultural awareness and its communication strongly affected to business and organizations. Crossing cultures is extremely difficult and requires the right kind of communication. Cultural diversity in a work group provides both impunities and difficulties. When manages successfully, it brings economic benefits. For organizations that send managers on foreign assignments. The cost can be high, as those managers need to adjust to their new environment. Cross-cultural effective communication is useful and worthy which can deal with conflicts that arise within multicultural. What would the ideal manager of international operations look like? The ideal manager would have a "very good command of several languages and knowledge of and sympathy for several cultures" ( Hedlund 1986: 31 ). Some authors argue that these managers must become cosmopolitans, to grow beyond cultural limitations ( Harris and Moran 2000). To be "cosmopolitan", according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, a manager must "be marked by interest in, familiarity with, or knowledge and appreciation of many parts of the world: not provincial, local, limited, or restricted by the attitudes, interests, or loyalties of a single region, section, or sphere of activity: worldwide rather than regional, parochial, or narrow." Discussion As if this were not asking enough of an international manager, Harris and Moran also distinguish between cosmopolitans and global managers. Global managers are cosmopolitans who have an additional facility for making appropriate business decisions anywhere that they operate. Given the near impossibility of either finding or developing such a manager, is it any wonder that we encounter firms of all types and classes making costly blunders in their foreign operations? Business people today face an increasing range of culturally diverse situations. To ensure success in business, many organizations are using cross-cultural communication to improve their manager's cross-cultural effectiveness and enhance their communication skills. In a diverse workplace there are many cultures collide. Many culture norms influence a manager's behaviour and subsequent reactions (Gardenswartz L. and Rowe A., 2001). "Culture is behind our behaviour on the job. Often without our realization, culture influences how close we stand, how loud we speak, how we deal with conflict - even how we participate in a meeting." (Gardenswartz L. and Rowe A., 2001, p139). This essay will provide the definition of cross-cultural and discuss cross-cultural communication used in business and organizations. In this brief essay, to further discuss about the importance of cross-cultural communication in business, the involvement and the examples. Discussion about benefits brought by the communication and perspective of the importance of cross-cultural communication will also provide. Cross-cultural communication has become important in today's business environment. From the communication employee can gain cross-cultural management skills like development and application of knowledge about cultures in the practice of international management, when the people involved have different culture identities. (Hofstede, 1995) A manager who is aware of different culture norms is less likely to incorrectly interpret behaviours and prescribe ineffective courses of action when developing people (Gardenswartz L. and Rowe A., 2001). Cross-cultural environment has become important in environment in nowadays. An example of a big cross-cultural issue is Canada (Demers J., 2002). Cross-cultural awareness is important. Today, cross-cultural issues raise primary in Canada's large cities, since 90% of Canadians who were born abroad live in the 15 largest cities in the country (Julie Demers, 2002). The need for cross-cultural capabilities has become crucial to international business (Selmer J., Torbiorn I. and Corinna T., 1998). The cross-cultural communication is used in business. It aims to develop awareness of group member's own behaviour within different cultures, in order to build good business relationships (Hurn B. F. and Fenkins M. , 2000). The communication includes building and sustaining multicultural teams, the problems of participating in multicultural meetings and developing cultural synergy (Hurn B. F. and Fenkins M., 2000). The communication is the process of altering employee behaviour and attitudes in a way that increases the probability of goal attainment. It is particularly important in preparing employees for overseas assignment. The manager who is quick to group firms into clusters, however, is not much better off than the one who treats the world as consisting of a homogenized culture. All countries are different from all others. Some are just more different than others. And, to the degree that they are different, they require different behaviours from the firms. The Asian countries of Japan, China, and Korea are often grouped together as being similar. It is felt that if one understands and can function in Japan, then one can function equally well in China or Korea. However, regional specialists have noted that business organizations in Japan, the People's Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea are not run by the same management principles. In Japan, there is a strong focus on group loyalty and consensus, expressed as wa. Mutual cooperation is of primary concern so that the group can devote their energies to reaching group goals. To more readily reach this state, many Japanese managers will insist that business dealings only occur among friends. In Chinese business relations the guiding term is guanxi, with the emphasis being on the relationship between two persons. It is based on friendship and the exchange of favours, which tends to favour the weaker member of the pair. And, in Korea, the guiding principle is inhwa, which refers to harmony, especially between those of unequal status or rank. (Hodgetts, 2000) There is vital role of cross cultural communication in determining the extent of internal consistency or local isomorphism. These include the degree to which an affiliate is embedded in the local environment; the strength of the flow of resources such as capital, information and people between the parent and the affiliate; the characteristics of the parent, such as the culture of the home country, with a high degree of distance between cultures being predicated to lead to more internal consistency. (Mead, 1994) The exogenous factors include industry characteristics and technology, the nature of competitors and the extent of change; and country/regional characteristics such as political, economic and socio-cultural conditions and legal requirements. Endogenous factors are the structure of international operations, the international orientation of the organization's headquarters, the competitive strategy being used and the MNC's experience in managing international operations. In much of literature the political, social, economic, cultural and institutional contexts are treated as simple contingency factors instead of seeing them as part of a complex context in which their effects are mutual and impossible to disentangle. Models tend to confuse cross-national with cross-cultural differences, which risks confusing what will remain stable. The distinction between nation and culture is critical. Comparative approaches tend to directly compare cross cultural between countries and subsequently provide an explanation for why they might exist, reducing political, economic or cultural dimensions to do this. 'Nation' is a rather loose term. Cross-national studies therefore tend to operate at the macro level, taking a gestalt view of an unrelated set of factors that might be at play. However, researchers also need to identify underlying organizational or individual processes through which behaviour results and understand how these processes operate as part of a system. Cross-cultural communicative studies operate at the micro level and look at the relationship between specific parts of the system and the notion of culture in its totality and theoretically linked outcomes at work (Schneider and Barsoux, 2003; Tayeb, 2003). Customers are looking at features of the products/services, for example, quality, costs, design, and technology content and so on. Suppliers are interested in the suitability and stability of the relationships with its customer company. These two stakeholders have been driving the pace of change in international business, with an increasingly global marketplace and the growth of international joint ventures and alliances as a dominant mode of business. This has impacted on international staffing in a number of ways. (Estienne, 1997) First, in the increasing number of trading blocs throughout the world, and most obviously in the European Union, the growth in international assignments is less amongst the giant "blue-chips" (which are often reducing their numbers of expatriates) than in smaller or newer organizations in the international arena. We can see this in the case of Pacific Direct and Stepstone. In both cases these companies had to become international in the initial stages of their existence. Neither of these companies had any history or experience of internationalization to guide them and took very different routes to achieving their goal. Pacific Direct adopted a franchised approach, whilst Stepstone had to deal with recruiting and socializing substantial numbers of staff in many different international locations in very short periods of time. International managers from existing Stepstone operations needed to be able to quickly and efficiently instil a corporate culture and adherence to company methods. Second, the unique issues relating to expatriation in international joint ventures (IJVs) have only recently been the focus of attention by researchers. However, the differing forms of control structure and intent in these forms of international organizations also create additional complexity for the role of the expatriate. Many of the failures of IJVs have been attributed to HR issues, such as staffing, communication, delegation of authority from parent firms to the IJV and difficulties in adapting to a host country (Warner, 2003). The same authors argue that, as the key HR issues in IJVs include selection and recruitment, training and development, spouse and family considerations, performance appraisal, compensation and reward systems and career and repatriation needs, the HR function should have a critical role when firms decide to enter an IJV. Rolls-Royce had more experience in sending technical expatriates abroad, but was relatively inexperienced in using these people to work within their international joint ventures and alliances. Third, developments in world trading, most noticeably the extensive European and Japanese investments in the USA and the cross-border developments in new world trading blocs, particularly, of course, in the European Union, have led to a substantial increase in transfers between developed countries. Expatriate managers working in countries with highly educated and professional employees can no longer adopt an autocratic approach without any regard for the outcomes. Equally, motivation and development of local country nationals is an integral part of creating a truly global operation and as such should be reflected in performance measurement of expatriate managers. (Warner, 2003) The cross - cultural communication appears to have a significant influence on the group performance. Language barriers are the second largest source of misunderstanding in cross - cultural communication, with 'assumed similarities' being the first one. Teams can sometimes have difficulty developing this understanding. Each member's understanding is collared by his or her views, personal agendas and objectives. Understanding each other must be supported with listening skills. Conclusion The distance between a manager and subordinate can be considered as to extent to which employees can agree with their bosses or managers. It has two different styles: high distance and low distance. High power distance culture is usually found in some oriental countries, especially in Japan, Korea and China. Superiors seem to be entitled to more privileges. They are the centre of the whole company, their status (based on age, experience, or position) gives them the right to tell others what to do, and subordinates always esteem the managers. On the other hand, in western countries, an employee can have different opinions to his/her boss and can discuss problems with their manager face-to-face. Actually, deference of power in low power distance is based on knowledge and experience, rather than status or position alone. Because of the different realization of power distance, conflict and misunderstanding must emerge when two or more who come from different power distance cultures work together. In this situation, managers of multinational companies must pay attention to the clashes and be aware of the difference of cultures. The manager should know how to let those employees work together harmoniously and cooperatively. As the medium of information, language is used to express ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. Different nations use different languages, so there will be loss or misunderstanding during communication. For instance, in some countries, people like using implicit words, which are hard for foreigners to understand. It will cause big problems in cross-cultural negotiations. Language-based misunderstandings will happen, even with two native speakers of the same language, but from different dialect groups or social classes, communicating, because of accent, slang or technical terms. The non-verbal channel is another contributor of misunderstanding. For example, an Indian shaking his/her head means "yes" instead of "no"! In order to reduce language-based misunderstanding, overseas sellers should follow the "customer orientation" principle and do business in the customer's language and communication style. In other words, it is essential to pay extra attention to the communication process, even if it takes more time. Social rules are defined as shared expectations about the behaviour that should and should not occur in specific social situations. But the rules are different from one situation to another. In a word, to keep an open mind about other people's social rules and respect for those rules is very necessary. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". From what has been discussed before, cultural conflicts are inevitable during cross-cultural business, due to differences in company management, language, attitude toward times, social behaviour, etc... People are not all the same under the skin. As a professional business person, he/she should be willing to learn other nations' cultures and keep an open mind, and adapt himself/herself to fit into the business environment in order to get the best achievement in business. References Demers J. 2002, 'Crossing the cultural divides', Volume of CMA Management, pp.28-30 Hurn B.F. & Fenkins M. 2000, 'International peer group development', Industrial and Commercial Communication, vol.32, no.4, pp. 128-131 Selmer J., Torbiorn I. and Corinna T 1998, 'Sequential cross-cultural communication for expatriate business manager: pre-departure and post-arrival', The International Journal of Human Resource Management, vol.9, no.5, pp 831-832, 835-840 Schneider and Barsoux (2003) Managing Across Cultures 2nd Ed: FT- Prentice-Hall Harris Philip R. and Robert T. Moran. 2000. Managing Cultural Differences. Butteworth- Heineman Publishing. Hofstede,G (1995) Cultures Consequences, Sage. Tayeb, M (2003) International Management: Theories And Practices FT-Prentice-Hall Warner & Joynt (2002) Managing Across Cultures: Issues and Perspectives 2nd Ed Thomson Estienne M., 1997, 'The art of cross-cultural management: "an alternative approach to communication and development", European Industrial Communication, vol 21, no. 1, pp14-18 Hodgetts R. M. and Luthans F., 2000, International Management: Culture, Strategy and Behaviour, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, USA Mead R., 1994, International Management: Cross-Cultural Dimensions, Blackwell Publishing. Read More