Cultural Conflicts in the Company

Cultural Conflicts in the Company

Cultural conflict is perhaps a problem in most companies especially in those where business units exist in different region. Researches and studies have found that there is no perfect company that can say that cultural conflict doesn't exist within their organization. This is because there are still powers that history brings to influence people, even in a little way, on the behavior of humans regarding cultural differences.

One company where cultural conflict can be found is IBM. Despite of the fact that the company is in the line of technology, advancing the future without limitations, IBM has attested cultural conflicts within the organization. However, this problem was not just left unattended. One instance where issues are apparent due to conflicts in belief between the employees and the management was regarding the culture of IBM; conflicts arise in terms of work performance evaluation by the management, as well as conflicts between the employees themselves. From her article, Satish Shah indicates the following testimony of Louis Gerstner, an IBM executive who rebuilt the culture of the company.

Employees were not sure whether it was their teamwork or their individual aspirations that sought top management's appreciation. Also, employees were apprehensive about issues like risk taking, consensus building, and corporate protocol.

He also observed a great amount of jealousy among employees, each one fiercely protecting his own privileges. Another shocking discovery was that the employees stationed in the European continent received only selected communication from Gerstner. Reason: the IBM head in Europe intercepted his e-mails. Gerstner confronted him and clarified that employees were not his personal property, they belonged to IBM.

Sources of Conflict

IBM is a multinational organization that is open to employing individuals from different cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the company operates in different regions that in fact have different traditions and cultures as well. These are perhaps the two main reasons why conflicts within IBM exist.

Particularly in the conflict between Gerstner and the IBM head in Europe, conflicts arise because of the different culture that Americans and Europeans have. There are several assumptions that can be considered to deduce why conflicts arise between Gerstner and IBM head in Europe. First, the action of directly sending emails to European employees may be offending to the head of IBM Europe. It may be a culture to Europeans to show respect to the organization heads by communicating with them first before any other employees. Second, it can also be assumed that the action committed by Gerstner may just really be a normal procedure to the culture he was brought in. That is, that his business culture is to be straight and direct to the point and that he did not really intend any harm to the IBM head in Europe. Thirdly, based on several researches on the European business culture, Europeans tend to totally balance the pros and cons before deciding on an action. They even use group of authorized decision makers before coming up with a decision. This is in contrast to the American culture that is usually straight and direct to the point in terms of decision-making in business. As indicated by Jared Wade, in his article The Pitfalls of Cross-Cultural Business,