Several Key Cultural and HR Policies and Practices in the UK and Germany - Research Paper Example

Today, almost all organizations make attempts and are keen to establish a set of basic human resource practices and policies to govern the work place modalities, these policies and procedures are seen to be greatly affected by the cultural and institutional features of the country or region in which the organization is located. This paper seeks to critically compare and contrast the major cultural and institutional features and predominant human resource policies and practices in UK and Germany. Culture of a particular group or society is there way of life as defined by their beliefs, values, attitudes, thoughts, psychological and social orientations. In this paper, cultural and institutional features and the predominant human resource practices and policies in UK and Germany will be compared in relation to the theory of cultural dimension. In the comparison between Germany and the UK, both the two countries managed a same score (35 points) on power distance. Germany is viewed as a highly decentralized country while at the same time it is also strongly supported by a large middle class. Any co-determination rights that may exist are carefully taken into consideration by the key management in various institutions, in addition to the leadership being continually challenged to display appropriate levels of expertise. (Hofstede Centre, 2013). On the other hand when compared to the UK, the British society has been noted to be strongly advocating for and believing that any inequalities that may happen to exist between people should be greatly minimized. Several inherent tensions in British culture has been shown by Hofstede as pertaining to one not being limited to how far they can be able to progress in life irrespective of where they were born on one hand, and the relative importance of birth rank on the other hand (Hofstede Centre, 2013). The individualism scores of the UK are high at 89 and considered among one of the highest countries on the individualistic score. The policies of the government and the British people are considered to be a highly private and individualistic. The government policy in the country is strong on education of children. Children in the UK are often taught to always try and think for themselves in addition to their trying to find out how they can be able to effectively contribute to the economy of the nation and play a role in society after establishing their unique purpose in life. On the other hand, the German society attains a score of 67 on the Individualism score (Hofstede Centre, 2013). The German government policies appreciate the parent-children relationships with little emphasis on uncles and aunts. Economically, the German communication is ranked as being one of the highest scores globally in line with the accepted ideal of one being honest even if it hurts (Mooij, 2007). The German society is also highly considered as being a mainly masculine society with a masculinity score of 66. The government policy in Germany values good performance and is strict on the school system which is keen to spate children into several different types of schools when they reach the age of ten. The general sense is that people in Germany “live to work” and their tasks provide them with self-esteem. This has done a lot of good to the economy of the nation. On the other hand, the British society also attains a score of 66 in masculinity (Hofstede Centre, 2013). The policies of the British government also advocates for success and improvement of the country’s economy. Generally, the UK society is highly driven and success oriented. People in Britain also live to work and well defined and clear performance ambitions in order to improve the economy of their country (Strangleman& Warren, 2008). On the economic uncertainty avoidance, the UK has a score of 35 and is seen to be quite a happy and prosperous nation (Gibson, 2002). The economic situation of the country is reflected by the low score in UAI, the British as seen to be relatively comfortable in any ambiguous situations that they may happen to encounter. (Hofstede Centre, 2013). On the other hand, the German has a higher score on economic uncertainty of with score of 65 points on the UAI index. The government policy in Germany aims to place a lot of importance on details so as to ascertain that a economic projects are well thought-out. Germans are seen to compensate for any high uncertainty on their part by strongly relying on their individual expertise (Mead and Andrews, 2009). As described earlier, culture is a way of people’s life defined by their values, beliefs, attitudes, among other psychological and social orientations. The Germans are mainly a moderately short term orientation culture due to the low score of 31 points on the Hofstede’s Long term orientation. The German culture upholds traditions and is seen to greatly respect customs and traditions in addition to having relatively small propensity to saving habits as a result of the relatively strong social pressure of impatience towards one achieving quick results (Chaston, 2012). On the other hand, the UK has a lower score of 25 points compared to Germany. The UK’s government policies on the economy of the country and planning horizons are seen to be short and intent on achieving quarterly goals and various quick results. Some of the inherent problems that have been raised in regards to Hofstede’s model include the term “power distance” should not be considered to be an independent variable and should instead to consider as part of the “Individualism vs. Collectivism” element. The “Masculinity vs. Femininity” is an inappropriate factor in the measuring of a social culture. Trompenaar’s system seeks to overcome these disadvantages by being more focus-oriented. It attempts to analyze what is on a people’s sight and minds, it also attempts speaks about the framework and logical organization of a culture’s behaviour. To do this trompenaar’s system evaluates seven different aspects which are; universalism-particularism,specific-diffuse, collectivism-individualism, sequential-synchronic, neural-emotional and Inner-directed-outer directed aspects. Using these focal points, tromenaar’s system is able effectively overcome these inherent disadvantages of Hofstede’s system (Moon & Choi, 2001). German Institutional features are characterised by their having embraced some mainly Neo-Corporatist ideological features and the varying economic situations and government policies. According to Schmitter, one of the main merits of a neo-corporatism is the fact that adopting neo-corporatist institutional features is conducive to stimulating relatively high economic growth rates. The economy of Germany is growing steadily due to the less trade union strikes in Germany as Neo-corporatism allows for extensive discussions between management and workers (Birch, 2007). The government policies also demand dialogue and discussion between the trade unions and employees, and this establishes a steady economic growth. The German institutional features are also marked by their active employment of constructive engagement with various trade unions. The government policy is also firm on the rates of taxation which is relatively high. The German institutional features are also marked by their adoption of work councils. Adoption of work councils has caused the labour moment in Germany to be relatively very powerful at all levels from the shop to the boardroom. The work councils in Germany are very powerful and have authority over all personnel in an organization. The government policy demands that the work councils must approve of all personnel transfers within an organization even if the transfer is only within a certain given department. As a result of the work councils, Germans tend to enjoy greater job security than workers in various other countries such as the United States and the UK (Hall & Hall, 1990). The policies of the German government also make it relatively difficult to fire an employee and German firms have mostly resulted to simply bypassing incompetent employees during promotions or assigning them job niches where they will be deemed as causing the least damage (Hall & Hall, 1990). On the other hand, the government policies in the UK have mainly focused on the neo-liberalism institutional feature. The government policy on this institutional feature considers customers as the main agents in the economy. In addition, neo-liberalists consider it offensive for one to consider consumers as being rather weak in the face of the often large corporations. The UK’s government policies also advocates support for open markets, deregulation and economic liberalization in order to stabilize a steady economic growth (Payne, 2012).Trade Unions are considered to be a key feature of the British Industrial relations system. Trade unions in the UK tend to focus on achieving three main objectives, these are; improving and providing various key opportunities that are designed to help the workers in the UK to advance towards full employment, helping in the continual maintenance and general improvement of the working conditions, hours and wages that employees receive, and constantly attempting to extend the influence that is exerted by the working class over the various industries in addition to arranging for their participation in management. As such it can be seen that trade unions plays a major role in the economy of the UK. This is because the UK have successfully provided various benefits for themselves in addition to their working towards the development of various social services in the state (Singh & Singh, 2011). According to Hollinshead (2009), the human resource policies and procedures can be broadly described as the set of formal guidelines and rules that businesses have compiled and put in place to help them in the hiring of new staff members, their training, their frequent assessment, and any rewards that are to be given to their workforce. Different countries have varying perspectives on the cultural dimensions and institutional features of the human resource policies and procedures. When these policies and procedures are carefully organized and disseminated in a form that is easy to use, they can serve a vital role in the pre-empting many of the misunderstandings that may happen to arise between an organization’s employees and its employers pertaining to the employees’ obligations and rights in the business environment (Redman & Wilkinson, 2001: Harzing & Pinnington, 2011). In addition to the varying differences between the UK government and the German government, other countries experience the variations too due to the different cultural dimensions. The cultural dimensions on human policies and procedures affect several other countries in the Europe (Harzing & Pinnington, 2011). Some of these key differences include: firstly, hiring and firing: various management methods can rarely be applied without any modification between countries in Europe. This is especially so as pertaining to employee dismissal as different countries such as UK and Germany have different protection laws that vary in degree of toughness (Garratt, 2010).Secondly, written contracts: Although having a written employment contract is not such a crucial requirement in some countries in Europe, this does not mean that one can be hired on oral basis especially in countries like the UK. All organizations operating in the EU are required to prove a statement of detailed and written particulars to the new recruits in its employment. The statement should contain information about their job and should be issued to the employee within a time period of about a month of their starting work (Meinerset al, 2012). The British institutional framework is found to be more permissive as compared to that found in most of its other European countries neighbours. Traditionally speaking, there has been a constant lack of any legal regulations that have been designed to help in shaping of the country’s industrial regulations and human resource management. This has resulted in a situation that has witnessed the collapse of the more traditional pluralist industrial relation which some industrial relations researchers have termed as the collapse and end of this traditional form of institutional industrial relations. The increased permissiveness of the industrial relations system in Britain has been blamed on the myriad of legal interventions into the country’s industrial relations that were made by the UK’s conservative government in the period between 1970 up to the year 1997 (Tempel, 2001). In contrast to their original aim of increasing the extent to which legal regulations govern the firms operating in the country, these legal interventions have served to critically reduce not only the power that that the country’s trade unions used to wield, but also, have actively served to disseminate the corporate efforts that were previously exhibited by not only the various human resource management but also the industrial relations systems in the country (Brewster, 1994). In contrast to these industrial relations and human resource management in the UK, German industrial relations and human resource management practices are subject to more binding and uniform regulations that are mostly based on the formal agreements and statute that have been negotiated and encompassed by all the parties in the agreement (Harzing & Pinnington, 2011). Only moderate legal regulations governing human resource management has been enacted within the last two decades. The industrial relations scene in Germany is also more stable as compared to the UK’s; this has resulted to a situation that has seen the determination of the human resource management policies in a company being heavily dependent on work council determination. The work councils in German provide a close link between collective and individual employment relations and it is vital that their input is carefully considered and taken into account in the development of these human resource polices (Müller-Jentsch & Weitbrecht, 2003). As seen from the above paragraphs, the United Kingdom and Germany have various human resource policies that contrast to one another. For example, in terms of recruitment and selection policies that in Germany it determined at the subsidiary level. In contrast, the recruitment and selection policies are determined at the establishment level. (Brewster, 1994)Training and management development policies and practices in Germany where the human resource directors is not considered to be part of the board, in the UK, the human resource director is part of the board of directors. The human resource polices of the organization are usually, on the whole, carefully worked out at the human resource management head-office level. During the development of these policies, there is a constant liaison with the various on-the-spot executives. This is seen to be in contrast to German policies where the roles of the human resource manager are mostly taken up by the chairman of the board or the managing director (Brewster 1994).In contrast to the German human resource where the main career development method that is used is succession plans, in the UK, assessment centres and performance appraisals that involve information exchanges ad interviews carried out between a company executive and his respective chain of command are the main career advancement methods used. The UK career advancement system places more weight on the feasibility and method used in the career development (Brewster, 1994). In summary, as it has been discussed in the paper, although the UK and Germany happen to have contrasting institutional features, they share several key cultural and HR policies and practices. It is of vital importance for one to put the differences and similarities into consideration especially in the event that one needs to expand an organization’s operations into either of the two countries. Personal Reflection on a Cross Cultural Group Work Experience I had the opportunity of working with persons from cultures that were completely different from mine while I was working on this project recently. I worked with three member groups, one from Thailand and two from China. This gave me a chance to experience various cultural dimensions. Initially during the group formations, I never wanted to be assigned to work in a group with people from different culture from mine. This was mainly because I had previously found it hard establishing a good and working rapport with most of them. However, I found myself assigned to work in a group with fellow students who shared different cultures based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. During the familiarization stage, I found my listening skills to be severely stretched as I attempted to try and carefully understand what some of the members were saying. This is mostly because of their different accents. I found myself afraid to keep on asking them to repeat themselves as I was afraid that they would perceive this as being rather rude of me. According to (Levi 2011), conflicts often arise during the familiarization stage of a group discussion. Nevertheless, I managed to at least know their names as they introduced themselves. During the planning and preparation stage, I was assigned to work on a segment of the group presentation with one of the group members who shared a different culture from mine. We managed to slowly build up a rapport and I soon found myself enjoying his company. He was about the same age as I was and shared the same challenges that I was going through. Our various group members had unanimously agreed to rally at a later date to compile our work, ready for implementation. Although my new friend and I were available for the meeting on the set date, the other group members were all busy attending to other lessons, assignments and various other obligations. This gave us an opportunity to fine tune our work portion as well as get to better know each other. The group members arrived later and the implementation and completion process were rushed and were not as carefully worked upon as I thought they would (Levi 2011). Overall, I really enjoyed working in the cross cultural group. Working in the group has caused me to better appreciate persons from different cultures and I now find myself making more friends from cultures that are different from my own. In hindsight, I wish we had made more effort towards ensuring that we all met promptly. In the future I will ensure that I stress on the importance of this to all the group members (Levi 2011). Bibliography Birch, A. H. (2007) Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy. Routledge. Brewster, C. (1994) Policy and Practice in European Human Resource Management: The Price Waterhouse Cranfield Survey. Routledge. Chaston, I. (2012) Public sector reformation: values-driven solutions to fiscal constraint. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Garratt, B. (2010) The fish rots from the head: developing effective boards. London: Profile. Gibson, R. (2002) Intercultural business communication. Oxford University Press. Hall, E., & Hall. M. (1990) Understanding cultural differences. Yarmouth, Me: Intercultural Press. Harzing, A. W., & Pinnington, A. H. (2011) International Human Resource Management. Third edition. London: Sage Hollinshead, G. (2009) International and Comparative Human Resource Management. McGraw-Hill. Mead. R., & Andrews. G. T. (2009) International Management: culture and beyond. 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(2001) The cross-national transfer of human resource management practices in German and British multinational companies. München; Mering: Hampp. The Hofstede Centre (2013) What about Germany? [Online]Available at: http://geert-hofstede.com/germany.html [Accessed: 18 Feb, 2013] The Hofstede Centre (2013) What about the UK? Available at: http://geert-hofstede.com/united-kingdom.html [Accessed: 18 Feb, 2013] Read More