Content area
Full Text
Jacqueline McLean and Richard D. Lewis* comment on the ways in which globalisation is creating a multicultural corporate landscape.
Globalisation is, without doubt, carving a new, multicultural corporate landscape. Its march across the globe shows no signs of abating and it has enabled societies, both near and far, to be drawn closer together in a culturally rich and diverse global village. Citizens of this village are working, communicating and interacting with each other and each others' culture and conducting business together in ways they have never experienced before (Liu and Lee, 2008).
This poses its own challenges for managers, who not only have to manage global and local business operations, but also an increasingly multicultural workforce, which possesses multiple perspectives of reality, varying levels of knowledge, education and experience and who are the product of societal norms, values and personal belief systems. If not properly managed, such cultural differences have, according to Hall (1995:21), the potential to "ruin a partnership that otherwise makes perfect sense" and lead to "management frustration, costly misunderstandings and even business failures" (Hoeklin, 1 995:ix). This lends more credence not only to the effective management of multiple cultures, but also to awareness and understanding of culture, how it makes us who we are, what we are and why we behave the way we do. Importantly, within this management context, managers must also know how best to communicate with individuals, and global business partners, on a cross-cultural basis.
Cross-Cultural Management
The march of globalisation has turned conventional management on its head, making the management task a more difficult, challenging and complex one. Moreover, as many business decisions have become globalised, managers' roles have become intertwined with issues of cultural adaptation and conflicts in communication, exacerbated by cultural diversity (Xie et al, 2008). Thus, a knowledge and understanding of how to manage crossculturally is of vital importance, to ensure that the management task is a more informed and effective one. Two key aspects of this are cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural awareness, as we shall explore later.
Cross-cultural management has been defined by Adler (1 991 : 1 0-1 1) as the study of "people in organisations around the world. . . it trains people to work in organisations with employee and...