Contrasting Hr Approaches of Uk & Usa

The term "culture" has been used more and more recently but what exactly does it mean? Some have even regarded culture as "the most central problem of all social science" (Malinowski, 1939). According to Merriam Webster (2016), culture is defined as the arts and other manifestations of human achievements. If culture was as simple as Merriam-Webster defines it then the lives of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists would be much easier. As we know, culture varies greatly across religion, countries, and some cases in just states; the difference between the north and the south. We can conclude that culture is a set of shared thoughts, values, and cognitions (Geertz, 1973). With culture in itself varying tremendously based on values and location, then surely organizational culture is no simple concept either. The term "organizational culture" has just recently become to be used more (Barley, 1988). Though there may be disagreements on defining culture universally, researchers tend to agree that culture is of vital importance in an organizational context, whether that organization is a company or a government (Kilmann, Saxton, & Serpa, 1986).

Culture is "Customs and beliefs, art, way of life and social organization of a particular country and group" (Hornby, 2009).Hofstede selected specifically one company (IBM) staffs to evaluate the cultural measurement of the country(Mcsweeney, 2002) A study infatuated only on a company cannot probably offer depth to a complete country's culture (Sondergaard 1994)As William (2002) stated this can be considered to a trait of a company, the particular occupation, or the occupation in the particular company rather than to justify a

According to Luthans and Duh culture is the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior. This knowledge forms values, creates attitudes, and influences behavior (Luthans & Doh, 2015, p. 112). Culture is learned from experiences, and shared with one another. It is passed down from one generation to another. We here in West Michigan have our own culture that may have similarities to those in Mexico or China but some significant differences should be documented. One example is the difference in the value of time between the United States and Mexico. Mexicans put less value on time and therefore do not see typically have issues when a meeting is late to start.

Managing people is not easy, because everyone is an individual personality and everyone has their own opinion. Everyday people face different problems and challenges. These problems maybe small or big, but those problems need to be solved. Every individual has his own characteristic to portray. Variation of individuals should be taken into consideration in managing them. Factors like

It would be in order to first examine the connotation and exact meaning of culture. Sociologists differ wide in their perceptions in explanting culture and its inter-related concepts. The best definition from the military view point is given by Leslie A. White, who quotes famous sociologists Frank Boas and Melville J. Herskovits. He writes “culture may be defined (as per Boas), as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterise the behaviour of individuals composing a social group….”. He further quotes Herskovits and says, “When culture is closely analysed, we find but a series of patterned reactions that characterise the behaviour of the individuals who constitute a given group. Another writer Sapir quoted by Leslie white classified culture as the mass of typical reactions.’ Culture is best summarised as a way of life of the people. It is manmade part of environment. Cultures includes beliefs, ideas, religion, art, customs and other habits which the people acquire while living in a society. Another very important aspect of culture is that it is ever changing by learning and transmitting from one generation to other through a

Culture, the established, coherent set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices shared by a large group of people (McCornack, 2013) The differences that are shared around the world are not limited to race, religion and language. Culture is one of the largest distinguishing characteristics that separate people. Grecian culture is different not only to the United States culture, but the cultures within the United States as well.

The Hofstede Centre (n.d.) defines culture as the “collective mental programming of the human mind which distinguishes one group of people from another.” Chipulu, Ojiako, Gardiner, Williams, Mota, Maguire, Shou, Stamai, and Marshall (2014), note that “culture can be at once tangible and observable; latent and unobservable; or even an abstraction altogether” (p. 367). Culture therefore has many dimensions. Some aspects of culture can be observed by analyzing symbols, ceremonies, dress, and other aspects. On the other hand, some aspects are not observable from the outside, but have to be experienced. Looking only from the outside gives us only a glimpse into the culture values. A large part of culture is the unwritten rules of how things are done. This part of culture is not necessarily observable to an outsider. To fully understand the cultural values of an organization, you need to be inside the organization with access to those with years of work experiences.

There are four major culture types within an organization, namely the Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy and the Market (Kim & Quinn, 1999). These four cultures are translated into a model, named the Competing Values Framework. This framework shows the cultures, organized between two dimensions. The framework shows which culture coincides with which dimension, to show the effectiveness of the organization and the organizational culture.

In the current economy why do national variations in Human Resource Management offer particular advantages or disadvantages? Considering the current globalised economy companies have to deal with national variations in Human Resources Management to work effectively. That matter offers particular advantages and disadvantages. The current global economy is based on a free trade market and most of the time obeys to a capitalist model of doing business. Exchanges of goods, capital, knowledges and human resources are now established on a worldwide level. In the same time national variations in human resources management are observable and relevant when we focus on the culture of a country. Indeed national variations can have different nature as

A Dutch social psychologist and anthropologist named Geert Hofstede studied how different cultures interact with one another. The framework for assessing the many differences between nations and cultures was established by him and called the cultural dimensions theory. The theory uses six cultural dimensions to place a value on them. The six cultural dimensions are power, collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, temporal orientation, and indulgence. The data Hofstede gathered was based on surveys conducted by IBM, a US technology and consulting firm (Cultural, 2013).

Culture can be defined in many ways due to the fact that everyone can have their own distinct and traditional beliefs and values. “ Culture is fluid, it is not a static entity which one takes out of the box on occasion. It is with us daily” (Cultural Handout). Someone’s culture is set as the characteristics of the group practices in language, religion, types of food, social traits and habits, and the distinct arts and music. There are a variety of different cultures for example, Western Culture, Eastern Culture, Latin Culture, Middle Eastern Culture, and African Culture. All of these different cultures have their own ideas, values, and individualism, laws that are implied, civil rights, and even technology. In our, “ Culture Handout” culture is defined as the tool of the mind, “ it is an individual’s way seeing and interacting within the world. It encompasses one’s values systems, beliefs, and perceptions of the world around them. Race, socio-economic class gender, sexual orientation, ability, geographic location, age, religion language, etc. all impact the formation of culture, but these various context are not culture” (Cultural Handout).

There are many culture researchers that have explain culture and how individuals behaves in an organisation, we have Porter & co. (1975), George Murdock (1940), Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) etc. but this report shall be mostly based on the Geert Hofstede (1980) cultural dimension. He investigated the interactions between national and organisational cultures using the IBM workers as a case study and came out with four dimensions and later added two more at different times. They are:

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1962) identify over 150 scientific definitions of the concept of culture. Indeed, many authors have tried to define culture and this is why there are so many definitions and that a unique one is hard to find. First of all, Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) assume that culture is a suite of patterns, implicit and explicit, “of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts” (p.47). Later, Hofstede adds that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991, p.51). This definition is the most widely accepted one amongst practitioners. For Winthrop (1991), culture is the distinctive models of thoughts, actions and values that composed members of a society or a social group. In other words,

'Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.' (Hofstede, 1991)

Apart from differences in values, the emergence of HRM is further attributed to the pressures experienced in the product markets during the 1980-1982 recession in the United States of America; the decline of trade unionism; challenges emanating from overseas competitors especially Japan and declining rates of innovation in American industries .These developments sparked the desire to create a free work situation in which the employer and employee worked towards the same goal - the success of the organization. Elsewhere in Europe, the emergence of HRM has been linked to the internationalization of competition as a result of gradual reduction of barriers to trade globally and the reform of the public sector involving privatization of state corporations that had the effect of marginalizing trade unions. Pinnington & Edwards (2000), explain that in the UK in particular, such change was meant to introduce a business and market culture into a bureaucratic and an inefficient public sector and stimulate competition, which the UK was losing to the rest of Europe. The government engineered political as well as economic