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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1 MANAG<strong>IN</strong>G MULTI<strong>CULTURAL</strong> TEAMS <strong>IN</strong><br />
LITERATURE<br />
Before we start about discussing what literature states about “How to manage a<br />
multicultural team” we need to look at the perspectives and views on cultural issues and how<br />
is multicultural management taught.<br />
1.1 Anthropology<br />
An interesting perspective on cultural issues in the Business World is given by<br />
Michael P. Lillis and Robert Guang Tian in their piece Cultural Issues in the Business World:<br />
An Anthropological Perspective (2010). In this piece they describe that the core of<br />
anthropology is the relation between culture and human behaviour.<br />
Culture is described as a set of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour<br />
acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human<br />
groups, including their embodiments in artefacts (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952). Translated<br />
this means that culture means the visions, biases, beliefs, skills, customs, language and art<br />
which one grows up with in a specific society.<br />
But how does this relate to Business? There the term Business anthropology is used<br />
which is described as exploring the culture and social framework of a business organization.<br />
We all know that culture has a significant impact on an organization but how do we<br />
understand the real impact of culture. Even though many attempts have been made to do this,<br />
the majority finds that it is an “ideational” concept (Allaire and Firsirotu, 1984) meaning that<br />
it is a group of people sharing the same ideals. Another main concept is the “adaptionist”<br />
perspective, which comes down to the way a company does things and what it does. (Keesing,<br />
1974).<br />
5
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