Interrelationship between Human Resource Management and Peoples Culture - Essay Example

Introduction Human Resources Management is affected by many factors but the one that carries much weight is the culture of the people forming the organization for example their national culture. People’s culture tends to affect how strategies in relation to Human Resources Management are formulated and implemented within an organizational set up. An organization in one society adopts different cultural values from it while another does the same from its immediate societal environment. These two firms will exhibit differences in their approaches to issues relating to Human Resource Management. Furthermore, an organization’s socio-cultural environment affects the adaptation of Human Resource Management Strategies and different cultural contexts pose different challenges. For firms doing business in multicultural environments or generally across cultures parochial views to management of human resources can proof disastrous. This paper looks into the strong interrelationship that exists between Human Resource Management (HRM) and people’s culture. Theories that have been developed to explain the phenomenon are also to be explored. Background Today’s business environment has taken a turn to be one that is highly globalised meaning that a firm operating in a certain area or country, it does not necessarily expect to have people of that area only or even that country alone (Lawson & Shen 1998). This therefore stipulates that such kind of an organization should expect to have a workforce that is multiethnic or exhibiting variations in cultural backgrounds. This hereby calls for the HR Manager or the management to embrace this fact so as to ensure survival in the increasingly competitive and volatile global business environment. Just but to give an example is the tendency where firms from the developed countries set camp in developing countries and move ahead to adopt standard HRM approaches to their new workforce. This kind of approach tends to undermine the cultural reality of the people and these strategies before long crumble to the management’s amazement. This not withstanding, knowledge of the target market’s culture is essential in ensuring a firm’s survival. Culture as a concept Culture in this regard is the collective social occurrence that goes on to affect the HRM practices in an organization operating in a particular cultural context. A culture of a people is a phenomenon that cannot be changed due to the fact that it has been with them for a long time and that they identify themselves with it. Culture in this respect gives one their identity and to erase this is not an easy task if at all tried. Culture is known to influence how people perceive things and events, how they feel, act and think (Martin 1992). These aspects are important in determining once destiny thereby if incorporated in an organization they can also determine its destiny too. In the endeavor to elaborate this, culture affects communication, guides ones choices and interpretations. People under a certain cultural orientation are taken to be under influence of a certain common program distinct from that of other people from a different origin or background and for this reason immensely intricate to change. An interesting feature with a people’s culture is that the bearers are not much aware of it until they meet other people exhibiting a different culture. Interrelationship between culture and HRM According to Torrington (1992), culture impacts the HRM functions a great deal in organizations. A human resource cycle which involves selecting, recruiting, receiving feedback, training and evaluation is the one that culture sets its roots. When looking at a certain locality HR functions to a foreigner may be alien to them while they are slight deviations from the standard. To such an employee it will be more difficult for them to assimilate the new values and even more challenging in performing them. The same case applies to the management when a company shifts grounds to a different area or locality. The HR manager is bound to understand the cultural orientation of the surrounding community or the society’s norms, believes and general way of doing things. In this regard national culture can be termed as a huge factor to consider especially for multinationals (Hofsted 1991). Multinationals are more susceptible to influence of national culture in their HR functions since they spread their areas of operations to several nations. Cultural differences therefore play a key role in designing human resource strategies so as to be in line with the people’s cultural base. A new manager on the other hand should familiarize themselves with people’s culture so as to know the limitations that there are in regards to HR functions. It is therefore no doubt that cultural consideration is of utmost importance to management functions and more so to the HRM as it is the one that deals organizing, planning and controlling people and their output. Managers in today’s business environment as a result of the information above cannot overlook the effects that culture has on management practices. Firms are increasingly encountering problems between the management and the employees based on cultural differences. Institutions in a locality are mostly dominated by certain value systems that are followed within these localities for example family values and structures, religion, systems of governance available, rules and regulations governing the people and the system of education among others. The values entrenched in these pillars depict the oneness that the people have and in most cases the organisations operating here have predictable cultures within them. Theories have been developed to make it easy to understand the concept of culture and its dimensions. One dimension is that of relations between people whereby individualism is taken to contend with collectivism (Hofsted 1991). Individualistic environments promote lose ties between people and everyone is for themselves or has limited responsibility toward their families. Collectivist society on the other hand instills into someone right from childhood the sense of togetherness where one is supposed to integrate with the rest of the people in a society. These orientations go a long way in affecting how a person behaves, acts and thinks about other people and tasks right into their adulthood. Researches have shown that in societies that practice collectivism employees expect that companies treat them like they are family (Hofsted 1991). They expect that their company will at any time come to their support in respect to group decision making processes. In the same situations employees are seen to possess emotional dependence in a relatively higher scale on their institutions and companies. On the same breath companies whose employees’ societies practice collectivism have their compensations strategies hooked to family needs and seniority or ones ranking. Societies which possess individualism are highly capitalistic and comprise mostly of developed countries like USA, UK and Australia while the contrary is true and evident more in developing regions like African countries. Organisations that establish their operations in these regions need to be well aware of the distinctions each has so as to come up with appropriate HRM strategies that suit such areas. In an American environment for example the HRM strategies should aim more on giving individual tasks whose rewards are also individualized. When in the same environment a firm introduces policies that will aim at bringing people together to perform collective tasks with indirect rewards, success rate of projects allocated will be relatively low while the opposite is true. The two theories i.e. collectivism and individualism both determine an organizations practices in regards to hiring or firing, relationships, employee security, training and performance appraisal among others (Hofstede 1991). Relationships among employees are driven majorly by their communalism tendencies. In societies that have collectivism tendencies employees take the organization to be a community that should offer emotional support when need arises. When an organization in this social setting is tries to undermine the collectivism in employees should be ready to face cultural friction and this will definitely reduce performance. The company in this situation should be seen to treat its employees like family members and be keen to cater for their welfare and development otherwise they will feel left out. The HR approaches should be such that they respect the community consciousness of the employees as well as their group harmony (Lynn 1992). It has been seen that the willingness to perform by employees is affected by how HRM practices are influenced by culture. Performance appraisal is another area that has a cultural influence for many companies (Daley 1992). In a collective society employees are more comfortable with evaluation of groups or departments as opposed to doing the same for individual workers. This scenario is completely different in individualistic societies that lay emphasis on individual performance and appraisal. General HRM practices encourage that performance is evaluated on individual basis so as to uncover the needs of the organization in respect to training and development needs. This however is militated by the collective values that employees uphold. The other theory that is important to consider while examining the significance of culture to HRM is that of motivational orientation. Life to human beings is a challenge that brings with it uncertainties that are inherent to it. Under this consideration three dimensions shall be considered i.e. a person’s uncertainty avoidance, their power distance and lastly their masculinity against femininity (Hofstede 1991). In the latter one people behave, act, think and perceive things differently in a society based on their gender. Women are taken to be more social oriented towards their goals while men lean more towards egoistic fulfillment. Some societies are more inclined in respect to masculinity meaning roles on gender grounds are clear cut. Men in this kind of a society are supposed to show toughness and focus on material success. Women on the other hand are to be humble and tender. The feminine society on the other hand has both genders having their roles overlap such that any role can apply to either of them at any time. The other is uncertainty avoidance whereby individuals are made to react in a certain way toward situations that they regard to be comfortable or otherwise in structured environments or situations. Situations that are structured are known, predictable and therefore not surprising while the unstructured ones the opposite is true. For the uncontrollable situations the society tries to control them in as much as it can and how a society approaches this endeavor is what differentiates it from others. This is important in HRM where the manager should know the societies characteristics in this respect in order to know how to handle his staff members. The last one is power distance which emphasizes the inequalities that people perceive to exist among them. Those who are regarded to be subordinates perceive this insubordination in different in varying degrees depending on ones societal inclination (Hofstede 2000). These theories have shed light on how people’s culture can result to managers approaching HR management in certain ways and not others and that the different approaches are context based. A company’s employees are taken to be living in a wider and complex society and they tend to bring with them the norms and beliefs that are upheld in the societies they hail from. Researches conducted on the relationship that exists between HRM and culture show that employees’ dedication to their duties can also have a cultural backing (Hofstede 1991). Managers should therefore question themselves on what cultural values does a certain society exhibit so as to know how to perform HR functions. For companies operating in global environments the challenge posed by culture to HR managers is even greater and more consequential in regards to performance. A company of this nature shall have within the employees a mosaic of cultural diversity that makes it difficult to operate from a single set of standards stipulated by the mother company abroad. A good scenario to explain this phenomenon is when a company wishes to divest from American market to the African one. The mother company may have its standards of HR management stipulated to its mangers in Africa but the underlying factor is that they will most likely not fit in the new environment. When it comes to other management functions like finance or accounting the above mentioned cultural constrains do not manifest themselves. The reason for this is that culture dictates how people behave, act and perceive things and HRM deals with how they do this within the organization (Hofstede 2000). Therefore, employees are more likely to act, behave and perceive things in the same they do while back in their social lives when performing company duties. The link between HRM and culture is therefore quite strong and managers should not work toward eliminating a people’s culture from the organization but to come up with a blending formula so as to make everyone feel to be part of the company. The American firm in Africa may try to instill the American culture to the employees but at the end what prevail will be the African culture and its orientation. Research has also paved way to a realization that the management can try so hard to abolish the influence that people’s culture has on HR practices and actually see they have succeeded. However, the underlying factor has been seen to be that these employees while under a watchful eye behave in the required manner but when they are free to be, they go back to their original selves (Hofsted 1991). This tendency of forcing workers to adopt a culture alien to them has bred revolt and at times given a heavy backing to strikes which are directly or indirectly related to the opposition to change. In looking back at the African context it is the same issue that led to bloody battles for African countries to liberate themselves to gain independence. This independence is partly for the people to be able to practice their culture freely without discrimination and to do things the way they know how. The same case while narrowed down to a single company will result in the same scenario and rebellion. Managing people is not an easy task and has never been but for one to succeed, understanding their culture is paramount (Ogbonna1992). People tend to associate themselves more to things that they know and with people who are similar to them. In this regard in an organizational setting where there are people from diverse cultural backgrounds there is the tendency to have these people develop cocoons based of their origin. This case is evident in American manufacturing firms where Hispanics, Black people, Asians and whites all take sides and try to affiliate themselves to those that are like them. It is not surprising that the management of such a working environment can be overwhelmingly difficult. The underlying factor in this scenario is for the HR manager to appreciate the existence of this diversity from the start. Formulation of policies in relation to HR functions should take into account the diversity existing in a firm and in so doing have them tailored to suit the diversity. Failure to do this and trying to instill a single culture’s norms or appreciating others in expense of the rest becomes an immediate recipe for disaster in HR function. What neglect of ones culture does, is to make these people feel unwanted or insignificant (Aldrich 1992). This goes further to affect these people’s productivity and commitment to their work. In turn the whole company’s production suffers and there is enmity created among employees simply by the management’s action to seemingly favor people of a certain origin by adopting more from their norms and beliefs. Conclusion Human resource management is one area of management that has been seen above to be quite affected by culture making it one of the most important variables to consider while formulating management policies. It is no doubt that employees’ behaviors, actions and way of perceiving things, have a huge backing from their cultural backgrounds. The same applies to organizations where the same is adopted or accommodated for the employees to feel to be part of the firm. In today’s business environment many organizations are being forced to deal with complex human resource issues like a huge cultural diverse workforce. This is a reality that is hitting many as the world is becoming more of a global village with increased mobility of labor from region to region and country to country. HR managers should therefore develop awareness of the cultural backgrounds of their workforce although an appreciated fact is that one may not know their individual cultural norms. For a company that has a workforce which is culturally diverse, to appreciate the fact that there exist cultural differences is paramount to ensuring success. This is facilitated by formulating policies that do not bring in conflict of interest between the organization and employees or among employees themselves. Failure to do this leads to employees not working to their full potential due to their reduced morale and leaving them feeling left out. HRM functions need to uphold cohesion among employees and bring a lasting bond between the company and the employees to ensure high performance thus productivity. References Aldrich, HE 1992, Incommensurable paradigm: Rethinking organization, London, Sage Publication. Daley, DM 1992, Performance appraisal in the public sector: Techniques and application, Sage Publication, London. Hofstede, G 2000, Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviours, institutions, and organizations across nations, 2nd edn, Thousand Oaks, Sage publishers. Hofstede, G 1991, Cultures and organizations, London, McGraw-Hill. Hofstede, G 1991, Culture and organizations: Software of the mind, McGraw Hill, London. Lynn, V 1992, Organisational culture: origins and weakness, Human Resource Strategy. London, Sage. Lawson, RB & Shen, Z 1998, Organizational psychology: Foundations and applications, Oxford University Press, New York. Martin, J 1992, Culture in organisation: Three perspectives, Oxford University Press, Ogbonna, E 1992, Organisational culture and human resource management, dilemmas and contradictions: Reassessing Human Resource Management, Sage, London. Torrington, D 1992, Employee resourcing, Institute of personnel management, London. Read More