Cultural Issues and the Psychological Framework

It is hypothesized that cultural differences in behaviour will mean differences in HRM practices within different cultures but those within the same cultural cluster will be similar whereas those in different clusters will be dissimilar. Employees and managers from different cultures take decisions in different ways – the processes, behaviours and values are not the same. People have different value orientations as a result of individual psychology, life-stage and generation and assumptions about behaviour determined by cultures are linked to a variety of organisational behaviours.

Management Summary This Bachelor Thesis will yield insights in the applicability of motivational theories across cultures. Within a globalizing working environment this research will provide relevant information on how to motivate employees with a different cultural background. The research combines the theory of Hofstede’s four dimensions (Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism and Masculinity/Femininity) with two theories of

Unquestionably, organizations rely on business professionals that can manage their business across a variety of cultures. With the rise in globalization, it is imperative that business professionals have a high cultural intelligence, which is the ability to adapt to individuals of other cultures. Luckily, cultural intelligence can be developed and ameliorated with experience, training, and with a conscious effort (Cardon, 2013). As a Human Resources Manager, I have worked with people from numerous countries throughout my career, but they were all here in America. It was not until I took my most recent position that I traveled outside of the United States to one of our facilities in Mexico. Unfortunately, I knew a minuscule amount about their culture, but have been intrigued by them ever since

Globalization and technological advancement have dictated the need for managers to deal with multiple ethnic groups with different culture in their day to day interactions. According to Kulkarni (2012), cultures play critical roles in individuals, including values, beliefs, humor, worries, fears, hopes, opinions, attachments, and anxieties.

Managers in human relations needs a variety of skills and knowledge to help their firms succeed in the global marketplace. They need to cope with the initial shock that often accompanies working and living in a different culture. Also, they can become more effective through learning the language of the host country and interpreting accurately the work values of their foreign counterparts. The following traits may be associated with candidate’s who are likely to succeed in international contexts, such as, flexibility, sensitivity to culture differences, business knowledge, culture adventurous and a desire for their views. Before doing business with people from different cultures, managers can familiarize themselves with research that describes important cultural differences in work values. There is four dimensions on which different cultures can be compared, which includes of power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity/femininity.

The second approach is constituted by Hofstede, who makes various researches to compare work-related values across employees working for a multinational corporation IBM in a total of 65 countries. Using the information obtained with these researches Hofstede produced a comparison between national cultures on five dimensions:

Within the purview of the understanding of the theory of the person, relativism holds sway. Several things are at play in forming an individual’s response to external stimuli. An individual’s understanding of his culture often informs these responses. Whereas individual’s understanding of culture(s) is limited, that is the point where relativism comes in. where a knowledge stops is where another start, hence opinions vary in relation to the individual experience of a subject matter. The dynamics of a culture is dependent on its environment. These variables also have deep rooted relations with biology (Sapolsky 2017: 3). Sapolsky infers that there is a

Another, key fact the causes some obvious challenges in the Human Resource Management is language, which is an important key factor in the cultural dimension; to which emphasizes the way Human Resources Manager function. Some of the languages that can cause specific issues in International Countries may include those languages spoken other than their own. While most Human Resource Manager

Dr. Hofstede performed a comprehensive study of how values in the workplace are influenced by culture. In the 1970’s, as a Dutch researcher Dr. Geert Hofstede, collected and analyzed data from 116,000 surveys taken from IBM employees in forty different countries around the world. From those results, Hofstede developed a model that identifies four primary dimensions of differentiate cultures. These include: Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), Masculinity-Femininity (MAS), Individualism-Collectivism (IND), Power and Distance (PD). After a further study of the Asian culture by researcher Michael Bond in 1991, Hofstede added a fifth dimension in his theory, Long- and Short-term time orientation (LTO), also referred to as the Confucian Dynamism. His research has framed how cultural differences can be used in professional business transactions. Geert Hofstede 's dimensions analysis can assist the business person in better understanding the intercultural differences within regions and between countries.

Cross cultural psychology and cultural psychology are two fields of psychology that are often confused. Cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology have many similarities and they differ in a few areas. Cross-cultural psychology is a comparative field of psychology that studies the cultural effects on human psychology. A cross-cultural study draws its conclusions from at least two samples of at least two different cultures and compares them in order to examine underlying reasons for diversity between the cultures, as well as the universals that each culture shares with another. Cultural psychology seeks to find the meaningful links between a culture and the psychology of the individuals living within that culture. Cultural psychology's main message is that human behavior is only meaningful when you're studying the behavior of individuals within the particular sociocultural, or in the culture in which the behavior occurs. The comparisons that cross-cultural psychology makes about each culture must begin with cultural studies.

In addition to the above institutional differences there are some cultural differences between countries that effect MNCS and HRM. The work of Hofstede focuses on how perceptions and values influence the way people interact and react to each other with the help of five cultural dimensions. Cultural difference namely power distance is the degree to which people in a society perceive the power to be distributed unequally. The high score of PD represents countries with the more organizational hierarchy and more power held by the people at the top levels of the hierarchy. Countries with a high Score of PD include India, China and South American countries. On the contrary, U.S can be one example of countries with low power distance (Hofstede, 2001). The second dimension is of Uncertainty Avoidance. It is the degree to which the individuals in a society are threatened by uncertainty risk. Countries like Saudi Arabia with high power distance and uncertainty avoidance tend to have rigid rules and leaders have more power. For example, India has a unique and diverse culture with a set level of hierarchies. The employees at the top level of hierarchy have more power that can be misused as those in power are backed by governments and unions. The social inequality, poverty and unstable political environment explain the high uncertainty avoidance in the Indian culture. Therefore, HRM uses training and career development programs as means of improving this high level of uncertainty

The Influence of Culture on Human Resource Management Processes and Practices. Dianna Stone and Eugene Stone-Romero, eds. New York: Psychology Press, 2008. 340 pp. $38.25, paper. Although national and international workforces have become increasingly culturally diverse, human resource systems and processes often lag in adapting to multiculturalism in ways that will reduce the cultural bias of existing human resource systems and enhance organizational effectiveness. Nearly 15 years ago Sharon Lobel and I developed a framework for our edited book, Managing Diversity, on the human resource implications of managing the growing diversity of the workforce (Kossek and Lobel, 1996). Although some changes have been made to account flexibly for

Culture is defined to the group of people which learned behavior that has already gave the instruction from previous generation through next generation by imitation and language (Adler 1983 citing Barnouw 1963). Also Schein (1990) describes that culture is a lesson that a group has been studied and solved the problem for internal integration and learnt to survive from external environment for over period of time. For example, behavior, cognition and emotion processes and in the deepest level which is included perception, language and thought processes such as attitudes and feelings. For most of organizations nowadays have to face with an increasing of a diversity of employees which are multicultural employees especially for multinational corporation (MNC) (Fitzsimmons 2013). To deal with different cultures and nationalities, the companies and managers have to learn and understand their employees such as common language, knowledge sharing and performance (Lauring & Selmer 2011) then see how multicultural individuals can help and contribute the organizations (Fitzsimmons, Miska & Stahl 2011) and set the policies or principles for employees could be followed (Demo et al. 2012).

• Cultures strongly influence the appropriateness of HRM practices. • Cultural differences can affect how people communicate and how they coordinate their activities Cultural environment

As mentioned earlier, power distance can either be low or high, for example, in low power distance, the relationship between the employees and the boss is good in that they can interact, sit together and discuss issues, however in high power distance, the employees are separated from their boss and there is a hierarchy of communication which must be strictly adhered to.