International Hrm Analyses for Haelec Products Ltd Essay

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.

Needless to mention, HR policies guide various functions of HRM. HR policies of certain companies seem to discriminate on the basis of its diverse backgrounds of its workforce for example, sex, race, age, religion, education, sexual orientations and so on and so forth. The sources of the country of origin effect lies in the culture and institutions of the home country of the MNC. The mechanisms through which the effect manifests itself are the hiring of home-country nationals by the MNC, and the inbuilt administrative preferences of these host-country nationals in the organizational structures, procedures and processes of the MNC. The homogeneity of the home culture, substantive characteristics of the home country culture, size and openness of the home-country economy, the cultural and institutional diversity of the environments in which the MNC operates, and the international growth path of the MNC are often taken to impact on the strength of the country-of-origin effect. Often, cultural perspective has concentrated its attention on the

Past experiences have demonstrated that cultural diversity in an organization can lead to issues. For instance, the implementation of a strategy in a context different from where it has been created can be difficult, conflicts between subsidiaries and the headquarters can exist, or management of intercultural teams can be problematic. Walmart in Germany is a relevant example of the cultural context importance when it comes to HRM. In fact, in 1997 and 1998, Walmart acquired two companies in Germany but it was a failure. It can be explained by the fact that feedback of the employees was ignored by managers. For example, in the morning they had to do exercise while singing the name of the brand. This practice may be a morale booster in the United States but in Germany it was seen in a really bad way, such as the practice of spying on colleagues, what can surely be related to the country’s history, among others examples. The US management practices was not in accordance with the German cultural context. (Macaray, 2011)

In this era of Globalisation, cross cultural management is the biggest challenge that is faced by the organisations. Within the business context, cross culture refers to interaction between different cultures. Cross cultural management refers to managing the employees from different cultural background in one environment (Adler, 2008). Cross culture management is a significant issue within the organisations as the success of an organisation depends upon the smooth interaction of the employees. This paper is aimed at providing insight on the cross cultural management and the main issues and challenges relating to cross cultural management. For the purpose of this paper, two articles, “Cross-cultural Differences in Management”, by Amman & Jordan

The importance of understanding cultural, ethnic and gender differences by managers and professionals in a business setting is essential to make the work environment comfortable. In every culture there are basic standards of thinking, and acting and these cultural differences strongly influence workplace values and communication. What may be considered acceptable and natural in the workplace for one person may be unacceptable for another person. People from diverse cultures bring new ways of thinking, creativity and language skills needed to survive in today’s work force. In many

Every acquisition is diverse and each brings about its own set of challenges. Nonetheless, the concept is consistent. As an acquisition transpires one company purchases another company, and this is executed in order to achieve an organization financial or strategic objectives. At times, it may be difficult for companies to increase revenues, but once a company is stable than they can look towards growing their business through different methods. One way to penetrate the markets can be through acquisition. Cara operations, has acquired many companies for an extensive period of time and they comprise of; Milestones, the Harvey's, Burger's Priest, St-Hubert chicken restaurants, New York Fries quick service chains, Swiss Chalet Montana's, Kelsey's, and East Side Mario's, etc. (Deschamps, 2018).

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.

Many HRIS doesn’t cater to all different cultures, in fact most of them only have the common values of the United States and several Western European nations. “This is unfortunate, because even though they may be well-intended, organizational practices often will have diminished effectiveness if they fail to consider differences in employees values”(Gueutal,2007). Cultures plays a big part in people’s life’s and the way they live them and having a HRIS that is designed to be “one system fit all” might lead to employees not feeling accepted or comfortable with the organization. All different cultures has their views on work ethics and narrowing it down to a system that allows only the values of some can lead to miss applicants and miss opportunity

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:

If you are to work effectively with people who are culturally different, you need to become aware of your own culture and how that impacts on others. As one textbook on professional communication puts it:

Mismanaging cultural differences can render otherwise successful managers and organisations ineffective when working across cultures. As stated byOsland (1990, p. 4) ``The single greatest barrier to business success is the one erected by culture''. Hofstede (1983) defines culture as "the mental programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another" (Hofstede 1983 p. 25). Through the comparison of Chinese culture and Australian culture using Hofstedes five cross-cultural dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and long-term orientation an insightful view into the differences and similarities of the cultures can be obtained (Chong & Park 2003). Human Resource Management

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 most recent studies in cross-cultural management reveal that the culture is a very expansive subject for organizations to study, especially for organizations, which hire the most diverse workforce. One definition of a diverse workforce could be as the one, which comes from different ethnic and demographic backgrounds (Plessis, 2011). For studying culture of the diverse workforce, there are two parts to study, the implicit and the explicit culture. The explicit culture includes behavior while the implicit part involves norms and values of individuals (Guang & Trotter, 2012). The explicit culture is already known when workers stay and work in a firm for a length of time, but the most difficult is to understand the implicit culture which is obscured in form of norms and values of the workers. Due to the differences of cultures, workers hold a great potential of variance, variety in terms of their explicit and implicit parts of the culture. The

Geert Hofstede developed a model which seeks to understand how values in the work place are influenced by culture. He started this study by looking at IBM operations between 1967 and 1973. Data was culled out from 50 different countries which were then extrapolated to 74 nations (the original 50 plus an additional 24).

Globalisation, as an integrated and independent world economy, has contributed to the rapid expansion of international trade and world’s economic growth (Paik & Vance, 2006; Mutsuddi, 2012). The increase presence of global firms is shifting domestic HR towards global HR in addition to carry out a wider span of HR responsibilities (Losey, Meisinger & Ulrich, 2005; Rao, 2010; Jie, 2011; Mutsuddi, 2012). The generation of cross-border labour market also had brought human resource management into an international context (Mutsuddi, 2012).