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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in Holland, educated in France, worked in German, France, Holland and currently in Estonia.<br />
How does the traditional education of multicultural fit to me?<br />
Egan and Bendick state in their article that the focus should switch from averages to<br />
teaching cultural competence, to regard each group of people as individuals and not as<br />
averages. It is of critical importance that you build up a relation with the people you work<br />
with; gain experience abroad as to get a higher cultural intelligence. So in short it is vital that<br />
current managers become educated by experience in order to be able to educate future<br />
managers by the sharing principle in Multicultural Management as described by Maxwell and<br />
Rijamampianina in their article “The sharing principle: a way of managing multicultural<br />
organizations (2002)”.<br />
1.3 The sharing principle<br />
This article mainly tries to answer the question how managers can better manage an<br />
organization in todays world where globalization is forcing managers to be more culturally<br />
intelligent as to use cultural diversity as a means to increase performance.<br />
Rijamampianina (1999) suggests that managers should focus on internal organic<br />
processes as these are inter related as in figure 1 and that successful management of these<br />
processes leads to higher levels of performance.<br />
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