Achieving Successful Cross-Cultural and Management Integration ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Achieving Successful Cross-Cultural and Management Integration: The Experience of Lenovo and IBM By Sharona Peng Moreover, those who working in a foreign country are surrounded by different language and culture value may feel loneliness and emotional stress. They start to be evocative of the culture in their country and thus unable to integration into the culture of the organisation. To avert conflicts, there are two suggestions for consideration. Firstly, it is important to conduct cultural awareness training for its staff as it can increase staff’s communications from both acquiring and acquired companies, understand each other’s culture from a bias-free perspective, and thus enhance the chance for successfully cultural integration of both organisations. In addition, useful activities can be carried out such as: team work, role play as well as practical training. These activities would be able to break through individual’s stereotype to other culture, to find out the differences more effectively and therefore more easily to adopt into each other’s culture. Secondly, when managing cultural conflicts it is important to resolve conflicts immediately after they explode by understanding the problem through formal and informal discussion, following up the result after implementation of the resolution, and adjusting the implication appropriately accordingly. The adopting stage is the third stage of culture integration. It is the very stage that requires the longest time among all stages. As cultures on both national and corporate levels are embedded in history and values that are psychologically rooted in people, there may be strong resistance for any changes. According to Pan (2006), most international M&A organisations in China often find it more difficult for the acquired company to adapt to Chinese culture as compare to international M&A in other countries, and as a result, they need longer time and more money. Therefore, it is suggested that at this stage both teams should actively be involved in understanding and adapting to each other’s culture. By active communication and adjustment, they will allow the organisation to form a range of new management style and structure that suits both cultures. 28 / 78
Achieving Successful Cross-Cultural and Management Integration: The Experience of Lenovo and IBM By Sharona Peng Here, two factors are considered to be most important. Firstly, before understanding the culture of others; it is essential to understand well the culture of its own. That could, it enable the organization to identify the strength and weakness of the culture as well as the factors behind them. By doing so, the firm could compare and contrast its culture with others rationally. Secondly, it is also vital to be culturally empathetic. As social categorisation and identity theories suggest “membership in any social group provides occurring lines along which conflict can be drawn”, such conflict results from members’ tendency to favour toward in-group members and discriminate toward out-group members (Turner, 1982; Kramer, 1991). As Turner (1982) suggests, individuals seek to maintain high self-esteem by defining themselves in ways that lead to favourable social comparison. By placing themselves and others first into social groups such as background and age, individuals then display positive attitudes or favouritism to their own group and display negative characteristics such as ethnocentrism to other groups. As a result, these stereotypes and biased attitudes can act as factors to restrict communication among group members and thus undermining group cohesion. According to Milliken and Martins (1996), one reason for this phenomenon is that people who are similar in backgrounds may have similar values, share common life experience, and therefore, find the experience of interacting with each other positively reinforcing. Therefore, organization needs to be culturally de-emphatic when doing culture audit so it will enable the team to analyse the culture rationally. The final, the last stage is the integration stage. As discussed previously, with the delicate situation facing international M&A organizations, integration of culture is not as easy as only adopting and superposing the cultures of both companies. Organisation needs to take into account its environment surrounded when developing a new corporate culture. For example, organization needs to rethink its social and market environment, operational strategy and direction, as well as the strength from both acquiring and acquired companies, in order to develop a culture that could enable 29 / 78
Page 1 and 2: Achieving Successful Cross-Cultural
Page 27: Achieving Successful Cross-Cultural

Achieving Successful Cross-Cultural and Management Integration ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?