Managing across cultures

Managing Across Cultures Response Reply to Hui on Diversity in the Workforce This post identifies diversity in the workforce as a contemporary challenge in every organisation. It uses a relevant article to show the importance of embracing diversity within an organisation’s workplace. This article is important in understanding about how to manage cultural differences and diversity in terms of gender, age and race. This post clearly brings out the importance of diversity at the workplace in terms of knowledge and skills provided by the different groups of people at the workplace. The post also reflects a clear analysis of the article in relation to the information and theories of managing across cultures. It refers to various concepts of managing across cultures to explain the content of the article. Therefore, it is an important post which enables readers to connect various concepts to real world situations.
The article reviewed suggests that the diverse human capital of an organisation can be used to represent the different needs of customers from different parts of the word. This is supported by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (2012) who suggest that managing diversity is important for companies located in different countries in order to utilize special capacities and gain competitive advantage. The article also indicates that diversity exists in terms of gender. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (2012) elaborate on gender differences, suggesting that female are more outer directed and synchronic than men. Women create values that are different but complementary to those of men. Therefore, they create a synthesis of values.
Regarding the importance of diversity on the performance of an organisation, the article reviewed by this post suggests that diversity in the workforce can benefit the company through improved performance if the company utilizes the different capabilities of the organisation. Different knowledge and skills are utilized from diversity in the workplace to create and innovate more effectively. Therefore, it shows that diversity is not just a challenge but also an opportunity for organisations.
The main challenge identified in an organisation’s workplace is the difficulty of managers to bring together people from different cultural backgrounds. Managers need to understand that managing across cultures requires people to respect each other’s beliefs and culture (Gudykunst, 1997). The skills and capabilities of different employees need to be utilized in order to achieve higher performance and productivity.
There may be various additions to this post. The post has not provided clear ways of leveraging cultural differences in organisations to achieve higher performance. It is therefore important to add that managers also need to use appropriate cross-cultural management techniques such as training, social interactions, workshops and conferences. In this case, employees from multicultural backgrounds are brought together and trained about the importance of working together to leverage cultural differences in order to achieve higher performance (Bird and Stevens, 2003). People may also be brought together to interact and share ideas based on their different backgrounds. This may result in more innovative products, services, processes or systems within the organisation.
In addition, discrimination is a great challenge in a multicultural work environment. It discourages effort and performance. Organisations are required by law not to discriminate against anyone during hiring and selection, whether on the basis of race, gender, age, race or ethnicity. Multicultural work environment need to be based on a fair and just hiring process so that the people selected to work in the company have the best qualification suited for the job.
Works cited
Gudykunst, WB 1997, “ Cultural Variability in Communication: An Introduction”, Communication Research, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 327-348.
Bird, A and Stevens, MJ 2003, “ Toward an emergent global culture and the effects of globalization on obsolescing national cultures”, Journal of International Management, vol. 9, pp. 395-407.
Trompenaars, F and Hampden-Turner, C 2012, Riding the waves of culture: understanding diversity in global business, 3rd edn, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, UK and Boston, MA.