CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT AND DIVERSITY

MANAGEMENT

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 Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3

Question One ............................................................................................................................. 3

Question Two ............................................................................................................................. 5

Question Three ........................................................................................................................... 6

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 8

References .................................................................................................................................. 9

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Introduction
G-Tech is a US based multinational company, which HR function and headquarters are in
Florida. G-Tech belongs to one of the leading organizations as IT or Information Technology
which have established in 1989. Total employees are about 50,000, among them 30,000 are
of Florida and remaining works abroad. G-Tech has many subsidiaries, among which
Germany was first one and others are Bangalore (India), Eastern Europe, China, Brazil and
Helnski (Finland). These subsidiaries are qualified in various areas, such as IT sakes,
manufacturing and development. However, according to recent context G-Tech’s
productivity has fallen and the cause identified by new CEO of the company is cross cultural
management issue.
Cross-cultural management usually occurs while managers use to overlook employees with
different background or culture, in comparison to their own. Moreover, it also occurs while
employees within an organisation or a team belong to various countries (Bird and
Mendenhall, 2016). This problem can only be mitigated effectively by identifying and
acknowledging about variety in cultures, preferences and practices of employees. According
to the case study, G-Tech has decided to transfer their headquarters based HRM policies to
their subsidiaries, based on HR report. This is to improve knowledge, intercultural relations,
and productivity of employees with their performances. In this study all the HR report based
on G-Tech subsidiaries has been assessed to evaluate and analyze cross cultural practice and
its impact and its relevant influencing factor, to find out possible suggestions.
Question One
Every MNC are booming at high rate and so there is no any escape route for G-Tech to adopt
with the cultural changes. Moreover diversity within culture has serious impact on HRM
policies. There are various factors that have been identified from the HR report, which is
using the success of HRM policies. Any standardized HRM policies generally includes
recruiting and hiring, termination and off boarding, salaries and benefits, performance
appraisal, codes of conduct, use of company tools and equipments, equality policies, conflict
of interest grievances, disciplinary actions and many more (Stone and Deadrick, 2015). Each
and every country follow different type of leadership style, such as formal, informal, where is
some cases hierarchy structure use to change such as flat, tall. In the case of Germany, the
subsidy prefer to follow democratic culture as their leadership style and are very much formal
in case of intercultural communication and business negotiations.
They prefer to keep all their professional process out of their personal one. This formal
relationship helps them to conduct any business process without any mistakes. On the
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contrary, this creates lack of employee relations, difficulty in decision making and also
creating misunderstandings. Thus, their formal behaviour hampering G-Tech’s standardized
HRM policies that are to create an effective employee relationship and also delayed in hiring
process. On the other hand, their democratic culture also affecting performance appraisal
process of HRM. Moreover, German subsidiary does not use any updated HRM tools, such as
Human Resource Management System (HRMS), Automatic performance solutions, recruiting
software, employee engagement tools, which leads to lowering their HRM policies within the
tech savvy and rapidly changing market (Colzato et al., 2017). On the other hand, in Florida
three are almost 2000 employees and among them 250 are recognized as expatriates. Florida
management practice distributed leadership which provides empowerment to all. This is
becoming the reason of conflict for the 250 expatriate.
Moreover, Florida used to communicate completely in American culture, this company is
multicultural. In this context, HRM is trying their hard to caller all the barriers to develop
intellectual competences. G-Tech’s subsidy in India is mostly influencing HRM policies in
many ways, as its management hinders practices of internationalized HRM policies and along
with this standardization of HRM is also low. Their HR team consists of all Indian and they
have very few intercultural relations and also interaction with other global employees of G-
Tech. This HR team use to practice through local instruments, whereas change management
is being done by global G-Tech. Moreover, it also influences HRM performance appraisal
and recruitment policy, as rewards are provided based on seniority, whereas recruitment is
based on nepotism. Moreover employees retirement date is also very late and employees have
less sense about time management. This detailed discussion clearly indicates that Florida is
more tends towards Convergence approach than Germany and India.
This is because, with presence of multicultural environment, employees of Florida used to
share their own ideas and opinions and also focus on their agreements to argue with it in a
friendly attitude. This indicates that, they are enough confident and energetic to achieve
company objectives. On the other hand, both in India and Germany, they valued their culture
more than any other global activities that can provide benefits to the company, which seems
that they have been keeping them apart from global aspects of the company and refers to
divergence approach. This difference in organizational approaches and national cultures can
be explained through Hofstede’s Cultural six dimensions (Beugelsdijk et al., 2017). Such as
for Germany their structure is flatter and so employees and supervisors considered almost
equal.

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It indicates toward Low Power Distance Index (PDI) and cannot accept any system where
power is being distributed unequally. In India, the culture is recognized as Low Masculinity
Versus Femininity (MAS), as they trade based on relationship and focus on quality of life
more. On the other hand, Germany is found to be as High Uncertainty Avoidance Index
(UAI), as they are very conservative about their culture and structure and not overwhelmed
easily. On the contrary, Florida acquire all the low High PDI, Low UAI and High
Individualism Versus Collectivism (IDV), as they structured with taller hierarchy structure
and focus more on time management, enjoying different challenges. Moreover, they are
more open to changes or to innovation and inclined towards decision making or learning in
debating and reflective way.
Question Two
G-Tech Germany believes in democratic leadership style as similar to their country’s
democratic culture. Leadership authority generally provided based on high status and
expertise of engineers, who comes through the apprentice system. Their competences are
high value if motivation, employee commitment, delegation and team orientations. Therefore,
it can be said that those employee relations are quite friendly, productive and consultative.
However, in reality divergence approach of the management hinders them to create a friendly
environment, rather than very formal relationships. On the other hand, this formal attitude
helps in practicing democratic leadership style by distributing responsibility within entire
workforce and enhancing their group discussion process that helps in increasing overall
efficiency. On the other hand, Florida G-Tech practices Distributed leadership, which is not
at all delegation that create barriers in building healthy culture within the workplace.
Distributed leadership focuses more on leadership practice, that it's specific roles and
responsibilities.
The major competence of this leadership style is that it equates with collective, extended and
shared practice of leadership, as empowerment that helps in building capability for
improvement and change (Mittal and Elias, 2016). Moreover, it focuses more on
interdependence interaction and practice instead of independent and individual actions,
similar to any other leadership roles. Thus, these competences help in growth and innovations
or the company. And employees are capable of working within open communication and
honest environment even in team meetings. However, cross cultural impact on this leadership
style often catering argument and conflict within employees, as empowerment contributes to
high ego. On the other hand, in the case of India G-Tech, their management practices
Participatory leadership style, which is a mixture of Autocratic and Democratic. Their higher
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authority keep relations with their employees personally and the mixture of this leadership
style helping them to work in risk environment.
However, the competence of this leadership style that is high rate of empathy is creating
distance from global interaction and relation making ability. Moreover, Parental leadership
refers to a managerial approach which involves a dominative authority, who use to act as
matriarch or patriarch and treats partners and employees as an extended family. In exchange
for these leaders expects trust and loyalty from their employees along with obedience. This
can be used as an effective leadership style to mitigate the cross cultural issues. A successful
leader of this category always considers that show their taken decisions can create an impact
on their family (Erden and Otken, 2019). On the contrary, participative leadership practices in
western countries seek opinions from their employees during decision making and ensure that
all employees have been agreed with this decision or not.
This discussion implies that by each and every aspect of leadership its affected by cross
culture. This is because cross culture carte differences in values, norms, beliefs and ideas
within an organization that affect behaviour, strategies and goals of leadership practice. The
cultural factor that create cross cultural leadership practices are traditions, moral values, laws
and languages of different countries. Along with this there are many contingent factors that
can create impact on cross cultural leadership are basically macro environment of the subsidy
where they are operating. This includes various changes of laws and regulations related to
trade and taxes, economic factors such as inflation rate, GDP rate, sociological factors, lack
of technology and many more (Feng, and Mueller, 2019). The best way to overcome any
cross cultural practice within an organization is to practice transformational leadership with
the sitting leadership style, as it can help in maintaining adequate HRM policies and thus
mitigating any cross cultural issues by mitigate its cultural and contingent issues.
Question Three
Intercultural communication is quite essential for today's globalization of trade. The most
significant elements of intercultural communications are motivation, mindfulness, cognitive
flexibility and tolerance for uncertainty (Webb and Vaughn, 2019). Here motivation refers to
any individual's desires to enhance intercultural relationship, which can be both intrinsic and
extrinsic in nature. Mindfulness refers to monitoring and assessing own communication
interactions to understand its capability. On the other cognitive flexibility employees the
capability to revise own existing knowledge about different cultures, in order to create new
and positive perspectives, rather than including the new knowledge within old perspectives
about any culture. The last and most important elements is tolerance for uncertainty, which
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implies that any individual should take care about its attitude towards comfort level with
different cultural background individuals. However, there are also some barriers that hinder
any individual for successful participation in intercultural communication process.
Those are anxiety due to discomfort level, searching for differences rather than similarities,
language problems, prejudice, ethnocentrism, misinterpretation of nonverbal communications
and stereotype or traditional type communication process (Pyle, 2018). Therefore, it can be
said the main barrier of Germany to successfully participating in intercultural communication
is their ethnocentrism and stereotype communication process, along with prejudice. German
is very much biased about their culture and use to prejudice it within intercultural
communication process. Moreover, according to their stereotype formal interaction process
they also maintained physical distance and sated the interaction with lengthy formal process
for seniority of employees. They beliefs that making first impression of German’s culture
within any intercultural communication process is quite important, which indicates towards
ethnocentrism. Any unclean behaviours within this formal meeting process can leads them
towards failure of tolerance about other culture.
G-Tech Florida use to communicate through American way and so their approach are quite
competitive in nature while negotiating, as American does not prefer silence , which can
provide any opportunity to misinterpretation. American has enough cognitive flexibility to
deal with intercultural discussion, but failed in mindfulness to assess their attitudes. This
often creates cross cultural issues within communication as there are many Indian presents
within Florida. Indians within G-Tech India dost feel comfortable to communicate with their
global partners and also they have lack of ethnocentrism, which does not motivate them to
connect with their global partners positively. They belief that as Indian believes in informal
relationships in business, other cultures should also believe in this, such as Germany. They
also cannot tolerate straight forward answers as American, if it is negative.
Hall’s typology about intercultural communication defines that it’s a form of communication
that can form a communication process which can share information throughout various
social groups and cultures (Oliver, 2016). In order approach towards intercultural
communication and to measure the intensity a scale had been introduced what represents high
and low context cultures, that refers to direct and indirect communication value. High context
culture defines value for tradition, long lasting relationships, and dependency on non-verbal
signs and explanations stringer boundaries and slows in change. On the contrary, low context
culture includes making of short term relationship, direct and brief communication, more
individualistic and tendency of change is quicker. Therefore, it can be said that Florida G-
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Tech intercultural communication belongs to low context culture, whereas India subsidy
belongs to high context culture. On the contrary, Germany has both high and low cultural
contexts as their communication differ based on culture to culture.
Conclusion
This assignment can be concluded as that, there are significant cross cultural practice going
on in the three regions of G.Tech. This can be mitigated by implicating adequate leadership
style that can mitigate the factors that are influencing cross cultural issues. Along with
cultural and structural differences intercultural communication gap is another problem that
hindering them to work in an efficient manner. This implies that G-Tech need to understand
all the regions’ cultural factor in indiscrimination perspectives and then have to decide
adequate way to implicate HRM policies.

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