International Human Resource Management of British Petroleum and Emirates Airlines - Coursework Example

International Human resource management al Affiliation: Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 3 International Cultural Variables 3 British Petroleum 3 Social Conflicts 4 Employee development 5 Emirates Airlines 7 Social Misconception 8 Management of Organizational Culture 9 Cultural Differences in Linguistics 10 Conclusion 12 References 13 Kolesnikov-Jessop, S., (2012) Respecting Cultural Differences. The New York Times. Retrieved on 15th August 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/business/global/francois-lancon-on-respecting-cultural-differences.html 15 Stuart, E., (2011) Mosaic Marketing Takes a Fresh Look at Changing Society. The New York Times. Retrieved on 15th August 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/media/ogilvy-mather-unit-tries-new-marketing-approach.html?pagewanted=all 16 Abstract At an international level, most companies bench their success and performance standards on their staff’s capacity to comprehend the culture of nations they operate in. This paper uses two MNCs (British Petroleum and Emirates Airlines) to assess this statement. It uses best practice examples at MNCs to develop an approach to dealing with differences in culture.  International Cultural Variables The cultural variable relating to face and face-saving is important across various cultures. It is, therefore, prudent to understand the various dynamics of face and face-saving in different societies. Face can be defined in several ways through which the social integration literature observes that the value a person has in others’ eyes relates to various elements of pride and self-respect. Will defined it as the ultimately negotiated public image which mutually grants each other the element of participating communication-based on the ideas of status, courtesy, power, outsider and insider relations, respect, and humor (Hofstede, 2005). In the western cultures, maintaining eye contact is greatly important even though various ideas of doing this vary. Even though several facial expressions are essentially similar between different cultures, their relevance in terms of interpretations is evidently culture-specific. It is in this regard very important to have an understanding of cultural values and starting-points in order to develop proper descriptions of emotions as expressed across various social interactions (Fung, 2014). British Petroleum British Petroleum requires that there is a continued investment in all aspects of human resources. British Petroleum has a high affinity toward keeping high levels of inspiration among its members of staff. This necessitates systematic approaches of addressing various challenges that face staff inspiration. Employee motivation is never left unmanaged at any given time. In the event that this happens, issues of natural deterioration of staff motivation are evident. Such programs need to be continuous, proactive and develop a rather long-term focus towards ensuring that there are sustainable staff motivation levels. With respect to direct staff motivation program, British Petroleum builds on a rather enabling staff motivation environment for the organization. Organizational development interventions are, therefore, continuously implemented for the purposes of ensuring staff motivation high levels in more sustainable ways (Wax, 2013). The available organizational structures need to stand review, as well as issues of layers of bureaucracy, power, accountabilities, organ-grams, communication, and reporting channels during analysis. In addition, obstacles have to embrace removal prior ensuring that such structures are not taken as possible obstacles to British Petroleum’s staff motivation. Special emphasis is given to British Petroleum’s culture change programs for making ensure that it remains developmental and progressive. Objectivity issues with respect to performance ratings, equity and fairness are addressed which could otherwise compromise staff motivation. Social Conflicts Social conflicts comprise of some misunderstanding. The conflict parties are in communication through what they say or not say as well as how they deposition themselves towards each other. Cutting across all, normal interaction involves faulty communication even though conflicts worsen such problems. High levels of conflict turn into costly misunderstandings (Stuart, 2011). An example is in the Cold War; the miss-communication between Soviet and U.S. leaders could have led to catastrophic consequences. At all levels of conflict, it is prudent to bring on board clear communication across the parties while working towards reducing unwise decisions for participants. Communication has a receiver and sender. Notably, the sender has a message to be transmitted and hence, puts it in words. To them, it best reflects their thoughts (Kolesnikov-Jessop, 2012). However, many things make undue intervention in preventing the intended information from being tampering. Additionally, many factors influence how such a message develops an interpretation from the receiver (Mahoney & Vallance, 1992). New pieces of information are compared with knowledge that the receiver already has. In the case, it confirms of prior awareness; the receiver is likely to receive such information more accurately even though there needs more attention to it. In the case there is a dispute to previous interpretation or assumptions of such a situation, the receiver may distort it in the mind to see how to fit it to the worldview (Princeton, 2013). This also includes dismissal of the information to be deceptive, simply wrong, or misguided. In the event that such communication remains verbal, the tone of voice influences the overall interpretation. For instance, are employees have a problem that requires the long break, harsh comments might be interpreted as a rude call for worker inefficiency. It is for this reason that, the tone of voice and the relationship and situational factors influence the message’s interpretation. Employee development Indeed, organizations need to understand that the ability of each person has a relationship to the integral competencies that are identified by the strategic workforce planning. Further, personal profiles as well as resumes actually contain most of the information, which has to be considered in the development of employee. British Petroleum considers garnering talent data from relevant acquisition aspects as an enabling factor for the organization to focus effectively on development plans that are tailored to fit each employee and therefore increase the success probabilities (van Woerkom & Reuver, 2009). Employee development addresses issues of the degree of preparation of people as well as their ability to deliver the expected results. The gradual integration of employee development to the aspects and variables of total talent acquisition will provide obvious benefits. Obviously, the development of employees is not one of the simple stages, which happen and instantly end. Instead, this continues even though it is critical that it begins immediately after talent acquisition. Clearly, there are a number of sub-components that need to be integrated with one another. British Petroleum has sustained approaches in getting its people up to current trends. This is done by having to set up activities as well as tasks that ultimately promote culture and job acclimation of the issues at hand through the development of activities occurring therein. An excellent example for this is on boarding. As many would believe, on boarding in British Petroleum is not the initiation of tasks and workflow in ensuring that people receive benefits, assets, and workstations (Stroh & Caligiuri, 1998). On boarding is a process through which British Petroleum get ‘talent’ to a point in which contributions become sustainable and meaningful. Orientation, mentoring, training, and eLearning are vivid examples of British Petroleum’s on-boarding components. Once British Petroleum has effectively determined that its human capital knows what the organization expects of them, it can help in the development of successful trends needed in managing performance holding them and accountable for results. Emphases are placed on the extent to which organizational culture faces threatening situations or remains anxious on issues of ambiguity. It is not essentially a risk avoidance approach, but a measure of how an individual in the organization deals with issues of ambiguity. The dimension to which people in a given organization prefer unstructured and structured situations forms the basis for cultural scoring ranging from high anxiety levels about ambiguity and uncertainty (Shapiro, 2012). The cultures will tend to keep emphasizing on the controls, regulations, and laws, which are designed towards the reduction of uncertainty. In the organizational cultures which score low on uncertainty avoidance, aspects and occurrences of ambiguity and uncertainty less dismay people. Emirates Airlines Emirates Airlines has been through an upgrade of its human resources information system upgrade. Current, the payroll module systems used can fully automate the employee payment process through gathering sufficient data relating to the employee’s time and attendance while calculating the due deductions and taxes to generate the periodic pay, as well as the employee tax reports. Some of the most-advanced modules continue providing a broad scope of flexibility within data collection methods coupled with labor distribution capabilities founded on data analysis features. Further, cost analysis as well as efficiency metrics form the primary functions (Harzing & Pinnington, 2011). The actual benefits of administration module will come in handy in the provision of systems for Emirates Airlines to administer and keep track of employee participation along the benefits programs. Such typical elements will essentially encompass compensation, insurance, retirement, and profit sharing. Data is entered from the time keeping modules to enable the calculation of automatic deposit as well as manual payment writing capabilities. The time and attendance module in Emirates Airlines allows for the gathering of standardized time as well as work related efforts. Further, the current HR management module on gender continues to develop considerable components that cover most of the subsequent HR aspects ranging from the application of the job to the employee’s retirement. The entire system goes on to record the most basic demographic as well as address data through the selection, capabilities and skills management, training and development, compensation planning records among other activities that are. The leading edge systems keep providing for the ability of ensuring the applications are readable while entering the relevant data into the applicable database fields (Lucas, Lupton & Mathieson, 2006). This will enable them notify the respective employers while still providing position management and control. After the upgrading procedures, online recruiting continues to be one of the fundamental methods, which Emirates Airlines employs in garnering the potential candidates to fill the available positions in the organization. Talent and work flexibility management systems used by Emirates Airlines typically include analyzing the personnel usage in the organization, identification of potential applicants and recruiting through internet recruiting sites and publications marketed to the recruiters and the applicants. Uncertainty avoidance deals with the organization’s tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. This will ultimately refer to the search for Truth by man. An organization culture programs make its people feel either comfortable or uncomfortable in situations that are unstructured. In this case, the unstructured situations are different from usual, unknown, novel, and surprising. Uncertainty avoiding organizational cultures seek to minimize the due possibility of the situations through strict security and safety measures, laws and rules as well as on the religious and philosophical levels through the of absolute Truth (Ramadorai, 2009). This dimension will also focus on how the organizational culture at hand adapts to the due changes as well as coping with uncertainty. Social Misconception While certain cultures quickly move to the main points, others talk of other things before the main point as a way of establishing rapport with the receiver. In case discussions on primary topics start suddenly, the group needing "warm-up" feels uncomfortable. Mediators and intermediaries with an understanding of this can help in explaining the problem while making appropriate adjustments on the procedures. Sometimes, the intermediaries continue making communication more difficult (McGregor, 2014). If the mediators are of the same nationality or culture as a disputant and not the other, it presents the appearance of bias, irrespective of the lack of one. When bias is not presumed, there is a commonality for the mediators in being supportive or understanding of the individual from their culture (McGregor, 2014). This is because they have a better understanding of each of them. When the mediator happens to be from a third group, the possibility for social misconception increases further. Engaging extra discussions for the process as well as the manner for carrying out such discussions become appropriate. The approach offers extra time to confirm and re-confirm understandings at all steps of the negotiating process or dialogue. Employee access will be awarded through the consideration of the widespread and general access to diverse organizational computers. According to Edwards, Marginson & Ferner, (2013) only up to 70% of the Emirates Airlines’ population has unlimited access to Internet. Emirates Airlines need to improve on this because employee self-service offer huge potential towards saving both time and money (McGrew, 2009). Proper good self-service systems help in smoothly guiding employees through aspects of entering due information relating to themselves as well as their dependents (Mor-Barak, 2005). This also forms the most-powerful reason for Emirates Airlines to exist in monitoring the employee online behavior within their workplaces. The utilization of Web-based platforms consequently allows Emirates Airlines to streamline its entire HR lifecycle beginning with recruitment and training all the way to payroll as well as benefits administration. Management of Organizational Culture In the management of organizational culture, individualism and collectivism seem to have dysfunctional and functional aspects within any organizational situation. For example, individualistic managerial approaches will concentrate on fostering development of self-confidence and self-concept for an individual (Halzack, 2013). There are high probabilities of embracing a sense of personal responsibility within the performance outcomes even as interpersonal competition continue generating a steady flow of ideas towards innovative change. On the other hand, there are also emphasis on the due aspects of personal gain, expediency, and selfishness. Further, personal stress high levels are probable by-products of the environment type as well as encouragement of interpersonal conflict (Caligiuri & Stroh, 1995). Therefore, as far as corporate performance acts as a fundamental signal for the managerial effort, there are other critical corporate specific forms of information, which are made available to shareholders that need to be taken into consideration for the pay settings. In global focus on organizational cultures, it is demonstrated that there is a major relationship between an emphasis on individualism and an organizations’ level of financial development and wealth (Brewster, Sparrow & Vernon, 2007). It is also identified that various relationships of individualism against the employees’ willingness to violate norms are triggered by their respective achievement motivation levels. Individualism and collectivism seem to form one of the rather salient organizational culture dimensions with respect to overall performance management. The consolidation of these processes into a single system will allow the small and medium sized branches of the firm to manage proactively all the HR operations while still improving on efficiency. The Web-based HRMS platforms used in the industry as a whole continue offering way more than the HR, as well as employee benefits within Emirates Airlines (Edwards, Marginson & Ferner, 2013). This is one of the reasons as to why there need be a solution which overly offers a broader scope of service offerings such as payroll, talent management, background checks, applicant tracking, skills training, pre-employment testing, labor law resources and recruiting tools. The industry has currently embraced robust and user-friendly tools for reporting the critical human resource issues. Within the range, it is also clear that the major reasons for its failure in implementation in Emirates Airlines is the lack of the dedicated resources, unrealistic period, overly broad scope, poor data quality and cumbersome system integrations. Cultural Differences in Linguistics While business turns global, there are more opportunities to address for the ever-wider scope of people and nationalities. Further, the world frequently uses English even though this gives the native speakers diverse advantages (McGrew, 2009). On the other hand, communication across people from different cultural backgrounds has a major involvement of the overcoming language barriers through speaking the language. For purposes of effectively communicating across different cultures, it is prudent to identify how best to use a language without causing intercultural misunderstandings and creating language barriers in the communication. Language differences have a major indicator in divergence of progress. Language is not necessarily how individual speak it illustrates their nature. The knowledge of the language provides insight into such cultural aspects (Brookes, Croucher, Fenton-O’Creevy & Gooderham, 2011). All these cultural differences for linguistics are part of the diverse challenges viewed in international communications. For purposes of overcoming them, it is important to perceive them objectively and clearly. Secondly, it is essential to understand how persons from subsequent cultures perceive the speaker as it is a self-awareness challenge. Lastly, it is important to use thorough social integrations for developing skills like communication in certain languages with non-native speakers, using body language and gestures comprehensible by other cultures. In its business setting, the main goal of Emirates Airlines is to decrease employee turnover. This allows it to decreasing the training and recruitment costs while ensuring that there is minimal loss of talent, as well as organizational knowledge. Through the implementation of lessons that are learned from the major organizational behavior concepts, Emirates Airlines continues to improve on its retention rates through decrease the costs linked to high turnover. Emirates Airlines used a guaranteed pay compensation system, which is mostly in monetary (cash) rewards (Brewster, Sparrow & Vernon, 2007). The most-fundamental basic element of guaranteed pay ponders around the base salary, which is paid on a monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly rate. One the other hand, Emirates Airlines considers the base salary to be typically used by employees to cater for their ongoing consumption (Tabuchi, 2013). In addition to this base salary, Emirates Airlines has subsequent forms of pay elements that are paid based mostly based on employee/employer relations including salary and seniority allowance. It is notable that Emirates Airlines embraces both internal and external employee recruitment schemes. Its internal recruitment strategies are well characterized by the promotion of well-deserving employees from within its firm and have them fill the upcoming positions. It uses devices such as email flashes, job posting boards, fliers, and intranet posts to advise the existing employees of the positions to vie for (Ferner & Quintanilla, 1998). This recruitment takes the form of creation and shuffling of temporary teams with the goal of filling various tasks and permanent changes. On the other hand, its external recruitment strategy has Emirates Airlines’ human resources department systematically searching from an employee pool outside its scope of employees to fill certain positions. It uses advertisements in job search websites, newspapers, referrals from current employees and job fairs to fill any of the positions. Conclusion Knowledge holds the success to ideal forms of work flexibility and national identity. Initially, it is important that individuals have an understanding of the various problems developed by their ability to adapt to new environments. They also make conscious efforts towards overcoming the problems. It is prudent to develop an assumption that a person’s efforts face a possibility for failure and hence the need to adjust a person’s behavior accordingly. For instance, it is assumed that there are significant possibilities that cultural differences cause gender based problems (Edwards, Edwards, Ferner, Marginson & Tregaskis, 2010). This ensures a willingness to be forgiving and patient instead of hostile and aggressive in case of problems. Participants should slowly and carefully respond within the social exchanges and not jump into conclusion that they know what they are being thought. A suggestion towards heated conflicts is stopping, listening, and thinking when the process gets tense. This means that the participants need to withdraw from the process and reflect on the happenings prior proceeding. This will help develop the social integration. Non-Verbal contact includes all aspect from the obvious things such as facial expressions and eye contact to discrete expression forms like the manipulation of space. It is evident that the communication system in this case means expression through various body movements. Active listening is a proper strategy in checking communication problems. Through constant repetition of what one thinks is said, it s possible to confirm accurate understanding of the communication. However, in case words are differently engaged between cultural or languages groups, active listening might overlook possible misunderstandings. Often, the intermediaries with a familiarity of both cultures will be of much use in securing the social integration. They can translate both the manner and the substance of what was placed forth. For example, they can tone down the strong statements considered appropriate across various cultures, but not in others, before presentation to people from various cultures that do not talk in such strong ways. References Brewster, C, Sparrow, P and Vernon, G (2007) International Human Resource Management, London: CIPD. 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