Cross-Cultural Management Relativism Global Business

Cross-Cultural Management Relativism

Global business and the growth of multinational organizations has created in the modern era many obstacles and opportunities that are related to difference and commonalities. The way that a different culture communicates, organizes, produces and overall does business can be very different from one culture to the next and though culture is not innate but learned these intricate and sometimes conflicting ideologies will have a great deal of affect on how a multi-national manager and those he is supposed to manage interact and come together to produce a desired outcome. (Hofstede, 2005, 4)

The multinational manager must ultimately transverse through all the differences with a fair minded sense of difference rather than conflict and create a mutual standard that gets the job done without altering to much about the base culture or creating to many conflicts regarding the judgment of the others' cultural business standards. The multinational manager must balance the demands and core missions and goals of the parent company with the way in which the foreign worker and systems run and develop, often times translating terms and ideologies that are innately foreign and rarely to be assumed as understood. (Adler and, Gundersen, 2008, 73)

Achieving this balance between the goals of the parent organization and the cultural perspectives and standards of the host culture can be the primary challenge of the expatriate manager and the modern as compared to historical standards of doing this are very different. While in the past seeing these differences and how they might affect the meeting of goals led to universal and blanket attempts to subvert the differences, remake the cultural standards and then to some degree force the host culture to accept the changes, even if just for the sake of business goal completion. Today this is not an acceptable or logical ethic and will likely result in more resistance than will be productive. Today it is more acceptable for the parent culture to accept and understand as much of the host culture as is possible and to restructure to meet common goals. (Adler and, Gundersen, 2008, 103-104)

Definition

Cultural relativism is born of the idea that colonialism frequently judged, juried and convicted cultures based on differences and then made changes to meet their own cultural ideas and demands. In today's standards of globalism this is not only not possible it is considered destructive and therefore managers and others from other cultures must see cultural difference not as a point of negative or positive judgment but as a relative reality in the foreign culture. To make changes these expatriates must either negotiate to make changes or leave well enough alone and alter his or her own standards, needs and culturally-based presuppositions to meet those of the other group. (Hofstede, 2005, 5)

Challenges arise when the expatriate manager has a difficult time balancing what he or she believes is right or wrong in his own culturally biased ideologies of organization with the differences he or she sees in the other business culture. The individual must to some degree learn to accept what he or she cannot or should not change and accept those differences which do not impact the managerial and organizational process in a negative way. The most important goal for the manager is to recognize the difference and alter his or her plan and even his or her thinking to accept these differences.

To some degree exposure to differences rounds the cultural reality of the individual and may even make him or her a better manager wherever he or she goes. Ultimately this is often a posthumous ideal that can no necessarily be seen while he or she is suppressing the urge to make changes that he or she thinks are important based on cultural differences but ultimately may actually reduce productivity and the ability for the two groups to work together for a common goal. The effective manager will be able to see the need for compromise as he or she is in the scenario of a varied culture. (Hofstede, 2005, 232)

Background of Relativism Dimension

A was previously mentioned the idea of cultural relativism in the modern world is based on the fact that colonialism, often seen as an insidious attempt to overrule one culture over another is fundamentally destructive to culture and therefore cannot be applied to business. Individuals and organizations must in the modern world learn to see differences as an opportunity, and overcome the obstacles they place in from of the individual expatriate manager to manage his or her workforce effectively to an organizational standard. Changes must be negotiated and balanced within the context of the foreign culture and must only be made when they prove productive to the common goal.

The east-west cultural differences are some that have been most pervasive in business as so much business transverses the east-west cultural divide. The differences between these two cultures can be staggering, especially with regard to developing systems that are culturally mutable. One example can be found in the system of Guanxi, which is a fundamental social and personal standards in the East that pervades business and allows it to work as a system of exchanges, which are internal and external. In the Western mind some of the conciliations made through this system can be seen as unethical while in the East these standards are accepted and considered ethical even if they are personal in nature. While in the west managers might see the negative aspects of the exchanges the East see them as a necessary part of paying forward to have a new need met in another area at a later time. (Hofstede, 2005, 221) In this system so pervasive in the eastern cultures interconnected family, friend and business connections interact to allow the whole system to work on a needs exchange basis and slights are paid for in kind later. Managers from the west might find that they inadvertently slighted someone in this system by making insularly decisions. Ultimately it might get explained away via ignorance or it might simply result in no future favors being delivered in some of the most surprising areas later.