Culture and Ethics in Business Learning Journal

CULTURE AND ETHICS IN BUSINESS

LEARNING JOURNAL

CHALLENGES OF MANAGER’S CULTURAL DIFFERENCES FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

Introduction

Business today has seen a high surge in globalization. This increase of international business all over has led to a number of ties and relations among people from different culture and nationalities. Managers who still haven’t adapted to the new age managerial skills and are still following the conventional route have found themselves extremely ineffective in the global platform. A need of global managers who understand multi-cultural competencies has arrived and most scholars debate that the working style, values and behaviour of a manager are directly a persona of their national culture. Thus in order to be competitive in this global market, the traditional approach by the managers must transcend to a global one.

A global manager is one who has the ability to manage the complexities in a business which is conducted or laid upon multi-cultural diversities. A global manager has many challenges when managing people from different cultures; this includes the people from both High context society as well as low context society.

Challenges

Lack of communication: When a manager is working with his team members who have different native tongue, it’s most possible at time that the information flow is not constant. Adding to the woes are the multitasking employees and talking to employees over phone which lack verbal cues can cause the message to be lost in translation.

Cultural differences: Cultural behaviour of individuals varies significantly and as a global manager gives a challenge. There are different types of relation among different cultures like:

* Dominant relation: In this type of cultural behaviour, people are independent and believe in individualism. They think that their success is because of their consistent effort and strong will and usually do not believe in...