Managing a Culturally Diverse Workforce Essay -- Business Management

In today’s ever changing and highly integrated world, corporations have a growing need to hire and maintain an exceedingly diverse and multicultural workforce. With increasing globalization, multinational corporations have a great advantage as they have an opportunity to work in different cultures and take advantage of a diverse pool of skills. However, there is a major cost of working in a different culture. Various issues arise when managing a culturally diverse workforce and the management needs to tackle the problems effectively. It is important to have an idea of different cultures as it helps in improving the efficiency and productivity of the employees. However, there are many issues when we are conducting cross-cultural analysis. These issues arise because of our lack of understanding of other cultures and at times, we are ignorant about our own culture. This can result in confusion about other cultures and we fail to understand that completely. This is a very serious issue that needs to be identified and resolved, as it is results in serious distortions about the cultures we are trying to understand. The paper will highlight various theoretical and practical cross-cultural management issues and will include various recommendations to solve these problems. CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT ISSUES The term culture is versatile and can be explained as a broad idea or concept. It is difficult to explain the term with a single definition, however, It can be defined as a set of values which define a way of life for the individuals and the society. It explains what is good or bad and right or wrong in a particular society. Thus, culture is a value system, which provides the ways of perceiving people, thinking patterns and the socia... ...ndations, which are helpful in solving these issues. Though sophisticated stereotyping and schemas are a helpful tool in understanding a culture but they are not sufficient. We need certain advanced tools to understand a culture completely. One of the most essential elements is attributional knowledge along with factual and conceptual understanding. This simply means that one should have an understanding to give credit when credit is due i.e. a person should have a clear understanding that any characteristic can be applied to anyone in a particular situation. This can be done through practice and by using a step by step model of cultural understanding. A detailed description of the Cultural Sense Making Model has been provided. By having a thorough understanding of our own culture and by considering context, we can have a better understanding of a different culture.