Management Across Cultures

Introduction

Today's business world has many global requirements as a result of the bad need for internationalization. In many business organizations today, culture has become a main issue that can be considered a benefit or a challenge as international organizations that have many different cultures among employees and managers can find this issue of facing culture a very important one. This made it important for many business organizations to train their managers to be efficient cross-cultural managers and be able to deal with culture effectively. The successful manager is that one who is able to motivate his employees and push them to work better and perform well with a high efficiency in dealing with the cultural diversity. The current paper is discussing some relevant issues to culture and across cultural management as it discusses how culture influences the working styles, different management styles and the importance of training managers to be inter-culturally competent.

Discussion

According to Wilson, (2005), culture leaves different influences on working styles as most business organizations today have overseas businesses and work with people from different cultures which can affect the work performance and this effect may be passive or negative. This was affirmed by Muenjohn  and Armstrong, (2007) who added that both individualism and collectivism can be associating factors for the cultural influence in business organizations as based on the policy of the host country where the business is; foreign employees can adopt individualism and be only interested in their own benefits and welfare which is passive influence for culture or they follow collectivism and be more cooperative and supportive for the business organization they work for. This view can be seen from another point of view based on the study of Vecchi and Brernann, (2009) who confirmed that culture can have influence on the employees' interaction in the workplace as employees and managers may find difficulty in understanding others' beliefs, values or behaviors when they belong to a different culture or this can be caused by the work environment and its conditions that may lead employees from different cultures find difficulty in communication and in understanding each other. This is true as some factors such as the leadership style or uniformity of practice can affect such matters and make culture either an advantage or a disadvantage for the organization.  Mohammed and White, (2008)discussed how culture requires a professional management that is able to be flexible enough to deal with people from different cultures effectively and can manage the conflicts that may be resulting from different cultural backgrounds in the workplace. Management style can be changed to face such conflicts as there are different models for dealing with conflicts by managers such as Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument as if managers ignored conflicts, this will lead to poor productivity and low business outcomes which make the multinational organization fail in dealing with the cultural diversity or make use of it. Hoang, (2008) explained how cultures can influence the different working styles of employees and managers as well through the cultural aspects that affect people's way of working including the corporate culture, ethnic culture, gender culture, communication styles and national culture as these factors can affect people's attitudes and make them change their working styles; for example, if the host country treats its expatriate employees in a sever unfair way; this in turn will make them follow individualism and be selfish which reduces the productivity and the efficiency of the work outcomes. He confirmed also that there should be an interest given for employees' values, beliefs, concepts and behaviors that are associated with their cultural backgrounds as they need to be respected and understood by others from different cultures.