Importance of Cross-Cultural Management in Contemporary Business Environment

Discuss about the Cross- cultural management in the business environment.

Cross- cultural management refers to the management of team members within an organization by considering the differences in culture, choice and practices of the customers in the local and international business scenario. There are many businesses, which need to teach their team members about working in a cross- cultural by asking them to adapt to the change in work environment. The cross- cultural team members have to understand the benefits of working with cross- cultural people where online communication is more convenient (Berry 2015).   

In the contemporary business environment, cross- cultural management plays an important part. The companies hire employees from other countries and culture in order to maintain competitive advantage. This report will focus on the importance of cross- cultural management and the role played by the members of a cross- cultural team. It will highlight the challenges and opportunities of working in a cross- cultural team by finding the underlying theories in the practice.  

There are many challenges faced by the members while working in cross- cultural management. Every manager has faced difficulty in managing a large group of people from different countries, culture, profession, age and nationality. The primary challenge faced in cross- cultural management is associated with IT outsourcing. Most of the clients expressed their disgust, as they did not get effective outcome by outsourcing their IT tasks to other countries. Quality is hampered by outsourcing of IT tasks as many employees are not sincere about their work and do not submit it on time (Bird and Mendenhall 2015). The clients always demand superior quality of work on time but that is not possible in reality.  

The behavior of the employees sometimes gets unpredictable and they show reluctance in doing their specific work. This might result out of their personal grudges against a specific tam member. A major challenge is faced by the management when the employees are not ready to work in a cross- cultural environment (DesAutels et al. 2015). They are unable to adjust to the members of other countries and nationalities, which hamper the quality of work. Communication becomes a major challenge while working in cross- cultural teams. As there is a language barrier, therefore the members cannot communicate with each other over a common language. The difference in culture does not allow them to communicate with sign languages. This is because the meaning of sign varies from one culture to another. For instance, in Japanese culture a person greets another by bowing down; whereas, in British culture a person shakes hand with another to greet them. This is a significant instance of difference in culture and lead to cultural clash if Japanese is shaken hand or a British is bowed down.

Challenges Faced in Cross-Cultural Management

On the other hand, severe challenge might be faced in cross- cultural management on the part of the manager. He finds it difficult to manage the team when he is an outsider as the local members are not ready to accept him in a managerial role (French 2015). There are differences in values and norms, which becomes a hurdle in the way of organizational activities. Due to difference in values and norms, the employees find it difficult to abide by the management and display improper behavior.   

Gulistan, Yunlu and Clapp- Smith (2014) countered that there are ample benefits of cross- cultural management alongside the challenges faced by the team members. An effective cross- cultural training helps the people to learn about them and assess them. They gather information about their culture as well as others’. This lesson enables them to work effectively in a cross- cultural team. Attitudes, behaviors and mentalities of the person changes and they start to adapt to the change in environment (Hauff and Richter 2015).

Confidence is enhanced among the employees by training them about the differences in culture and empowering them with a sense of control and responsibility. They are motivated to work with people from different cultural background by overcoming the challenges and differences. It helps in building trust among the team members, which is essential in an organization (Holden and Vaiman 2015). The barrier that is built between the employees of different cultures is broken by making them realize about the values of working in a cross- cultural team. People get motivated to work in a new environment and do not try to find excuses when they are asked to shift to another country.          

Cross- cultural management opens a wide scope in front of the employees as well as the organization. It not only helps in personal development but also improves organizational performance. The employees in a cross- cultural team develop better interpersonal and listening skills in comparison to others. They learn to respect and value the opinion of others and their culture. A healthy working environment is built as a result and the organization flourishes after that. The management plays an important role in this respect by eradicating any kind of cultural clashes at the grass-root level so that it does not hamper the efficiency and productivity of the organization (Jiang, Gollan and Brooks 2015). The future employment opportunities of the cross- cultural team members are enhanced in this way and they get the first priority as they have a competitive edge.  

Benefits of Cross-Cultural Management

Leasing a team in an organization can be inspiring, rewarding and also exhausting. The busy work environments can leave very little time for different types of team leaders to check in with the team and ensure about their happiness. The team leader must also ensure about whether the team members are effective, smart and creative in nature (Jyoti and Kour 2015). However following a number of simple steps can help the leaders as well as the management of the company to ensure happiness for the team.

Effective communication between a company and the employees enables businesses to fully tap into the unique knowledge, insights and talents of the people. The benefits of effective communication often stretch more beyond profit (Vertamo 2014). This helps the employees to feel happy and work with great pleasure. Development of a corporate culture that is forward thinking in its approach is essential for the growth of an effective intercultural communication. Some of the steps by which such kind of communications is practiced are as follows;

Enabling the Business Enterprise business based communications

Instant messaging helps the business in a number of different ways. First of all the archived group of individual chat logs be identified. They can be easily referenced at a much later point. It also helps to form seamless collaboration with different kind of team members from off-site locations. The management of the company becomes super capable to productively manage the multiple conversations of business at one time and also ensures the elimination of the long distance calling fees (Karin Andreassi et al. 2014). This implies that the management of the organization has to communicate properly by effectively empowering the employees to communicate. This can be performed by the management by means of sharing ideas among each others, information sharing as well as sharing different kinds of question among each other. The maintenance of the following strategies helps the employees to better understand each other and follow a same type of work regime that helps to achieve the success easily (Tjosvold 2017).

Improvement of Horizontal and Peer to Peer Communication

Improvement of the peer to peer based communication is one of the key tasks of the management and the use of the right kind of communication tools is utmost essential in this prospect. The use and implementation of different cross cultural programs in the workplace helps the employees to connect to both vertical and horizontal level of communications. The owners and managers of the organization are more accountable when the team members spend much of their time and energy to brainstorm ideas that can become more profitable in nature. The ideas put forward by them needs to be carried forwarded by the managers and supervisors, which needs peer to peer level communication skills (Thomas and Peterson 2017).

Role of Managers in Building Effective Communication in Multicultural Teams

Planning a Budget

The managers of corporate communication will need ample amount of resources to ensure the success of the internal communications. The establishment of a meaningful budget, the organizations needs to evaluate and weight the downsides of the failing investment in the employees capability to build a much more stronger relationship among each other (Mach and Baruch 2015). The building of this relationship helps in different ways. It helps to ensure a more trusted relationship and also helps to achieve success for the organization. The management must consider some additional things like the costs of employee turnover, product or service development, missed opportunities and understandings, employee engagement and morale and many more as such (Reiche et al. 2016).

Measurement of the effectiveness and impact of internal communication

Successful internal communications promotional campaigns provides long term returns that are generally orders of magnitude and more than their costs. The return is much more than the cost if the communication plan is successful. The managers are tasked with the duty to demonstrate the results and there are three ways to review the effectiveness and impact of internal communications.  It can help to analyze recent changes in productivity, sales and profits and helps to conduct surveys on employee wishes and happiness (Ramsey and Lorenz 2016).

Some of the recommendations are as follows;

1. Proper meetings and conferences among the senior management and the unions
2. Proper level of information sharing among the management and the unions or the leaders. This information has to be then shared by the unions or leaders among the employees
3. The regular visit to workplaces by the investors, shareholders and the management and interaction with the employees
4. Proper maintenance of different communication tools to ease communication in the organization.
5. The management has to ensure that each and every employee, managers must follow the communication rules properly to gain success in the market.

Conclusion

The cross cultural communications in general sense is believed to be a combination of traditions, beliefs, norms and values. It’s based on how a person behaves in a group or with others present in the group. The following report on cross cultural communication clearly states that culture has a much deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are generally believed to be shared by the organization among the employees and the managers. The proper sharing of such beliefs and information helps in the building of a certain level of cross cultural values in the organization. As mentioned in the report the organizations are now more focused on an effective cross cultural and scientific communication that helps them perform better and easily stay competitive and sustainable in the market.

The following report has exposed the reality of cross cultural communication which according to me seems to be one of the most important part of the organization. The role that cross- cultural communication plays is vital to the success of the organization especially in the modern days. This is because most of the large-scale organizations having their base all across the world employ a large number of people with different backgrounds altogether. Therefore, the maintenance of effective cross- cultural communication can ensure the success of the organization. However going through the report I felt that the implementation process of the cross culture needs to be according to proper scheduling and planning so that there is no disruption.

References

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