CHALLENGES IN MANAGING CULTURAL DIVERSITY A MANAGERS PERSPECTIVE

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egularly but they are divided partly or completely over different countries. The third form is a project team where the members work together in a so-called virtual environment and where most members are divided over many countries. Mäkiluoko researched among Finnish companies mainly the second form and found three distinctive leadership styles as per figure 2. Leadership Dimensions Polycentric Leadership Style Initiating Structure, including staffing, planning, delegating and Reporting Synergistic Leadership Style Ethnocentric Leadership style + Personal Human Relationships + Internal Negotiation People oriented leadership dimensions Task oriented leadership dimensions Figure 2: Conceptual relations between leadership styles. Ethnocentric management was the most common where the team leader is culturally blind, focuses on formal negotiation within the team and where the teams are split up in local and foreign. One can say that Ethnocentric is a defensive approach as described by Robert Day 2007, an organization that adopts the defensive approach treats cultural and racial differences as hazards – a series of weak links and mismatches between people in which there is great potential for misunderstanding, mistrust, conflict and even resentment. One can reasonably argue that such organizations have many problems with people from other cultures or people who do things in a different way. Cultural Synergy management, which describes a willingness to learn and understand other cultures, informal and direct interaction. 9
Polycentric management where the leader does not create one team but allows team members to work in their old ways and acts as a link between the members according to the cultural division. Both Cultural and Polycentric can be considered more a of Development approach (Robert Day 2007). These types of management consider cultural differences as something that people bring to the team as a collective result of the experience gained. A good expression is culture is ‘‘the way in which a group of people solves problems’’ (Trompenaars, 1993). When companies take into account the different backgrounds that people bring into the organization and accepts them as a given then there is a possibility for each member of the team to start sharing and talking about differences, constructive conflicts and compromise. Companies that truly look beyond cultural diversity see every person as an individual with its own specialized skills that can be applied to special business situations. Getting an insight in these skills of your team is the key point in managing a multicultural team. The most important is that as a manager you should be willing to learn the skill of analysing the cultural diversity of each member of your team. (Jinsoo Terry 2007) A multicultural workforce brings to a company the invaluable creative input of diverse cultures and backgrounds, particularly at the manager and supervisor levels. Carefully channelled, this is a major asset. For companies to be able to fully understand the concept of managing a multicultural work force there must be a willingness to change from top to bottom. (Jinsoo Terry 2007) From the CEO down to every worker there should be a focus on and positive attitude towards multicultural issues and one should become aware of differences. Communication between employees needs to be fostered and if necessary train employees in a uni-language to facilitate better communication. Learn about different leadership styles to fit expectations of people from different background. Open communication and people who understand each other will take away a lot of the distrust between different cultures and will help employees to speak up and be involved in decision-making and idea sharing. 10
Page 1 and 2: TALLINN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Sc
Page 3 and 4: Table of Contents ABSTRACT ........
Page 5 and 6: INTRODUCTION Being a manager in thi
Page 7 and 8: The anthropologist approach is ther
Page 9: In a study aimed at enhancing multi
Page 13 and 14: works in one country does not work
Page 15 and 16: was the way it was done and top man
Page 17 and 18: growth of the company. Basically as
Page 19 and 20: The key idea is to get the job done

CHALLENGES IN MANAGING CULTURAL DIVERSITY A MANAGERS PERSPECTIVE

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