CHALLENGES IN MANAGING CULTURAL DIVERSITY A MANAGERS PERSPECTIVE
Multicultural management is a result of globalization and the movement of people around the globe. As the international trade worldwide increases more and more companies will go global. Going global is equal to establishing local offices and coming into contact with individuals who have different national and corporate cultures. The challenge for managers is how do we create a performing mix out of all those different people with different languages and different opinions, perceptions, and biases. The goal of this research was to find out what has been written about Multicultural Management, how it is managed, taught and what are interesting approaches to managing a team of culturally diversified individualists. Some examples of Multicultural issues out of own experience are also given as to complement the theory of sharing in managing multicultural teams. Looking through articles the main issue noticed and mentioned by several Authors is that there is no sufficient research done to enable a manager to study on the best in class methods to manage a multicultural environment. Therefore any sharing of experiences with other managers is a key to creating a management force able to cope with managing multicultural corporations.
Multicultural management is a result of globalization and the movement of people around the globe. As the international trade worldwide increases more and more companies will go global. Going global is equal to establishing local offices and coming into contact with individuals who have different national and corporate cultures. The challenge for managers is how do we create a performing mix out of all those different people with different languages and different opinions, perceptions, and biases.
The goal of this research was to find out what has been written about Multicultural Management, how it is managed, taught and what are interesting approaches to managing a team of culturally diversified individualists. Some examples of Multicultural issues out of own experience are also given as to complement the theory of sharing in managing multicultural teams.
Looking through articles the main issue noticed and mentioned by several Authors is that there is no sufficient research done to enable a manager to study on the best in class methods to manage a multicultural environment. Therefore any sharing of experiences with other managers is a key to creating a management force able to cope with managing multicultural corporations.
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2.4 Estonia, Russia, Balkan<br />
After working in Europe for many years I had the possibility to work in Estonia again.<br />
My responsibility for a private equity investor was to evaluate new projects and assist<br />
management of local companies in solving problems. I came in contact with managers from<br />
The Baltics, Russia and the Balkan mainly. Over the years I have seen many projects grow<br />
big and go bankrupt but there were two extreme cases that showed to me an overall mentality<br />
of the soviet era educated self made managers in former CIS countries. We have used the<br />
term “soviet legacy management” internally in the organization.<br />
Soviet legacy management's definition is the “I know better syndrome”. It has been<br />
also the reason why I have evaluated many opportunities as non-commercial because when<br />
the management has this syndrome then you know you deal with a person who thinks that the<br />
organization cannot exist without him or her.<br />
When evaluating mainly eastern European countries for investments I have<br />
encountered the most interesting case where I as a representative of an investor interested in<br />
forming a joint venture was informed, “this is the way it works in Estonia, Russia, Serbia”,<br />
“what do you know about our culture”!<br />
As the owners were ethnocentric and lacked any real international or multicultural<br />
experience they had never experienced that there are people out there that could do the job<br />
better then they could.<br />
Actually talking non-owners/senior managers it showed clearly that the problem was a<br />
manager from an old fashioned, out-dated era. A highly educated person thinking that he is<br />
the only one qualified, others are stupid. A culture was created where the owner pulls<br />
important work to himself, does not invest in education and does not delegate but even worst<br />
of all is not open to re-educate him self.<br />
In this case national culture was not a dominant factor in the corporate culture but it<br />
was more a perception formed by an out-dated social system. Over the years I have seen<br />
many of these companies come into trouble as a bad corporate culture could not cope with<br />
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