Managers with knowledge about cultural difference can work with employees from difference countries and of course this provides an advantage of having many new ideas for their project or new plan. Moreover, managers also have a chance to increase understanding of political, social, legal, economic and culture environment of foreign countries from their employees during the time work with them (Adler,1991).
Furthermore, exposures of diversity colleagues in an organization encourage creativity and innovation. Increasing the diversity of an organization’s workforce brings a broad continuum of background, interest, point of view and ways of doing things in a firm. Different ideas provided by employees bring effective solutions to problems, improve quality of decision-making and encourages growth of creativity (Laabs, 1993). In any organization, it is important that managers view their workers irrespective of their age, sex, race and religion.
Awareness of different culture, a manager could bring their own product to other countries to open and penetrate a market. This means they get other marketing site, get more partners and of course the more partners, the more profit they. In marketing site, known your product means known your brand so that expanding is the purpose of all kind of product in business.
Moreover, A manager could bring satisfy to clients by knowing well their culture. Just have a look at their habit, their taste and their custom to going the right way of purpose and contract. Beside that, the important of other factor is words of mouth. According to notification, 01 nice sentence of your business from 01 partner can bring you 121 other partners.
In the law site, understanding of culture means get on well with the law and all government policies. This is the huge advantage not only to a manager but also their whole company when making plan for their product to that kind of market. It also avoids loss which can happen in business way. Lead the law and policies to their own product.
Success or failure of a company depends on manager’s knowledge, job- related expertise of employee and other factors such as responsiveness of both employee and employer. Research has show that failure s in the overseas business setting most frequently result from an inability to understand and adapt to foreign ways of thinking and acting rather from technical or professional incompetence (Ferraro, 2001). So that understanding different culture is one of factor which bring successful to a manager and his company
Culture is acquired by process of learning and understanding about it can help the manager has greater tolerance for culture differences, a prerequisite for effective inter-culture communication in a business setting.
With knowledge of different culture, a manager could find out the good candidate from different countries and could manage them in the right way. All customers- facing staff are engaged from the local people who service clients from their own country would make a nice appearance and make client happy cause they understand their custom, feature and special their hobby. A manager getting more choices when they make plan for his candidate upcoming and if he understanding clearly about the difference of culture and there is no concern about his staffs’ ability.
Knowledge of a customer’s language is one of the advantages in business of every businessman. This is particularly true in Latin countries where business conferences are conducted in a leisurely and unhurried way, in a highly social atmosphere. The manager who can speak the foreign tongue fluently and who can make intelligent comments on the art and literature of the country will not only gain business but also the respect of the person who he dealing with.
A manager who is aware of different culture norms is less likely to incorrectly interpret behaviors and prescribe ineffective courses of action when developing people. (Lee. G and Rowe A., 2001)
Understanding of cultural diversity provide many advantages .Because of that lacking of knowledge about cultural difference in the work place will bring some disadvantages that make the managers face some difficult in managing organization. For example, failure to understanding the difference perspectives and experiences of diverse employees is equivalent to under utilization and wastage of human resources (Blank and Slipp, 1998). Or the other disadvantage is miscommunication between managers and employees, supplier or share holders due to misunderstand each other because of lacking understanding languages and culture’s behavior.
Moreover, without understanding of different culture could lead the manager to ethnocentrism because all culture – to one degree or another- display ethnocentrism. A manager could go to the tendency to evaluate foreign’ behavior who is his or her partners or employees by standards of his or her own culture and believe that their own culture is superior to all others (Ferraro, 2001). This is not good for his management and may his business going down when create himself a selfish, not open to prater and day by day he loss his own.
Lack of understanding cultural differences dues to conflict between employees because employees working in an organization will have different characteristics and personalities. Conflicts are very likely to occur as different people have different views, ideas and opinions. Managers cannot be watchful for any signs of conflict if they don’t have enough knowledge about their employee’s culture.
Sometime, problems relate to cultural difference make managers stress because it due to lack of trust and communication inaccuracies (Adler,1991). Because of different culture, employees can not understand the manager’s behaviors and attitude.
According to many reviews of some professional persons which were written above, a survey was carried out to have more real point of view about culture diversity from many managers in difference companies and work place. Managers who were asked 10 difference questions about how important of understanding cultural difference at work place gave various answers.
Almost managers who have more than 30 employees in their department answered that they prefer employees from difference countries because they will have creation with wide range of perspective, more and better ideas when they work with foreign employees as a group. Following the interview, 80 % of reply of managers said that they have knowledge about cultural diversity at work place. It means managers in global business nowadays prepare enough knowledge to work efficiency and get success. At least 20% of response answered no with the question do they have any knowledge of cultural diversity at work place but they think that maybe in near future they need to have educational program which promote awareness of culture difference.
In response to the question “do cultural difference exist at your company?, 60% of managers who were asked gave yes, 30% said no and 10% supposed that may be in the future. From these answers, can be seen that nowadays cultural diversity is more and more popular in business and of course managers have to face a huge challenge to create a suitable managerial style.
As show in the survey, 40% of managers asked agreed that cultural diversity is very important in relationship between managers and foreign employees because they think that the role of the manager is to shape an atmosphere of discipline and harmony to make diversity successful in the organization. So if managers don’t have understanding about cultural diversity it will be really difficult to complete their role.
However, the other 40% of response assumed that it is very important to have understanding of cultural difference in relationship with foreign customers because the main role of the managers is to create profit for the company so successful negotiation with customers is the key. And without awareness about customer’s culture, it makes managers fail in communicating with customers and it due to unsuccessful business. No one in the interview gave the point of view that understanding of culture diversity is unimportant but 20% of them replied by giving the other answers. For example, they pointed out that knowledge about cultural difference is not only important in relationship between managers and employees, but also important in relation between workers within organization because if the employees in organization don’t have awareness of differences culture conflict is evitable. Or some one said that understanding of cultural diversity is very important to all the company include managers and staff because all of them need to face with the customer and they really need to have knowledge about client’s culture.
This point of view leads to the question should company have training program to help managers and staff aware understanding of cultural diversity? Of course many people who work in company say yes for this question but managers have difference ranking in their answers when they were asked to rank the benefits of having training of understanding about cultural diversity in company. 50% of response ranked that very useful for managers, useful for staff and not sure for all company to have training about cultural difference in work place. These people believe that managers who have relationship with employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders so it is very useful if managers have educational program in culture diversity to be good communicators or successful negotiators.
However, 20% of managers agree that it is useful for managers but neutral for staff to have that training. Remaining 30% of the interviewed persons suggested that the training is useful for managers but useless for staff and neutral for all company. They assume that the staff doesn’t need to have that training; it will be waste of time and money for all the company to arrange for their staff to join into the training.
According to the survey, 80% of total answers for the question: which level of the organization can be affect the most by cultural diversity is middle managers. Some of them explained the reason by observing that middle managers have to work with many people from difference department in the company. And they need a wide knowledge about difference in culture to create an effective management for an organization. The other 20% claimed the most influence of culture diversity to organization is in staff or operational level which includes many people from difference countries work together. Conflict is easy to happen if they don’t have understanding of culture difference.
Another question required people who were asked about this topic to rank the factors can be affected their organization. With economic, political, social include culture diversity and technological factor, the responses gave difference result. For instance, 40% ranked the most important factor is social with culture diversity involve and downward to the second is economic, third and fourth is technological and political. The other 30% of reply assume that culture diversity keeps the third position, the most important factor must be economic, the second and the fourth are political and technological. 20% of them gave the answer is culture diversity in social factors is very important but just stay in second factor otherwise economic always is the most important factors. Remaining 10% said that all of these factors have equal influence to an organization so they cannot rank which is the most important factor and which is not.
The last question mentioned here is a specific question which is how many language managers (who were interviewed) can speak. 60% of them can speak 2 languages, 30% just use English but they know a little bit about the other languages and at least 10% only speak English. This question related to one of the most important thing in culture difference- languages. If the managers know the languages of some their customers, it can be an advantage to help manager get the contract or drive the business in the way they want.
Language is one of the most important thing make culture difference. And it may actually influence certain aspect of culture. Thus, learning language is one of the best ways to have understanding about culture of country. Moreover, all the manager have to communicate with his or her employees, customers, suppliers…and learning the host language builds rapport and sets the proper tone for doing business aboard so learning language is very necessary for everyone specially for the business persons.
According to the survey’s result, understanding of culture diversity is very important to a manager today in global business, so besides improve foreign language, managers should learn their employees, supplier or share holder’s culture to have more knowledge about culture difference. And the best way to study their culture is talk to employees, join into their social activities, and work with them as a diversity team and so on.
In conclusion, managing diversity is definitely a challenge and also an opportunity for management in organization. And it is very important to manager today to have greater understanding about culture diversity in the work place because it brings many advantages to help managers create a suitable managerial style in their organization. Almost managers mention that organization mission is to value differences of the workforce and to capitalize on the potential of its employees. This can be indeed very difficult at times as people are often unwilling to move away from their traditional views and norms of proper behavior. Training programs are conducted to increase understanding of differences, stimulate open mind ness, improve communication skills and improve conflict resolution skills. These training programs help overcome challenges. Understanding of culture diversity also creates a great opportunity to success. Managers who encourage diversity benefit from competitive advantage resulting from greater innovation, better efficiency as well as increased attraction and motivation of highly skilled employees. Organizations are becoming more and more exposed to diversity in their workforce. And cultural diversity is increasing within the workforce – where managers require the understanding of values, beliefs and attitudes of people from different cultures. It is necessary for managers to have the understanding of building mutual relationships and have respect for diversity – so they can work together without difficulties.That why managers today really need to have understanding about culture diversity in work place.
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Reference:
Lee G. & Rowe A. (2001), Cross-cultural awareness, HR Magazine, pp.140-142.
Ferraro G. (2001), The Cultural Dimension of International Business (4th edition), Prentice Hall ,Upper Saddle River, New Jersey Publishing, pp 9-35-
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Laabs, J.J.(1993), Diversity training in a business strategy. Personal Journal, pp 28-29
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Margaret, P. & Peter, O. (2001). Managing Diversity an Asian and Pacific Focus, John Wiley & Sons Australia.
Blank. R & Slipp.S (1998), Managers diversity workbook, 75(7):7-
Interview with:
Kevin Howe, Chief Executive of MG Rover. Email address: (10/1/2008)
Matthew Key, Chief Executive of O2 Telecom. Email address: (10/1/2008)
Mr Garry Biggin, Business Development Manager of HSBC.
Phone number: 07767 006730 (5/2/2008)
Roland Klein, Manager, Corporate Communications.
Phone number: 072556299.(26/1/2008)
Nick Palan, Managing Director of Golden Tour.
Phone number: 072337039. (6/1/2008)
Dongsong Zang, Director of London Business Exchange Ltd.
Phone number: 082020873 (17/1/2008)
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Schein E. (1990) “Organisational Culture”. American Psychologist.
Thomas V. C. (1994) “The downside of diversity”. Training and Development.
Hodgetts R. M. and Luthans F., 2000, International Management: Culture, Strategy and Behavior, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, USA
(2005). Culture of Organizations. [online]. Available at: [Access on 20/1/2008].
