Culture Essay
Elvin, Wong Wing Chung (073085)
What are the main sources of conflict in cross-cultural management within an international organization?
Introduction
The boundaries between countries become less obvious and important today, people getting much closer than ever before. The whole world seems united into a single unit, and these changes are all brought by “Globalization”. International organization are also one of the products which produced by globalization. Working within a multi-national firm, it is unavoidable to work with people speaking different language, living with different culture. These cultural differences are always the main sources of conflict in the workplace.
What is conflict
Before the discussion of sources of conflict, we need to firstly know what conflict is.
According to Kevin Avruch (1998), “Conflict is competition by groups or individuals over incompatible goals, scarce resources or the sources of power needed to acquire them.” Such competitions are determined by the people’s perception to power, resources and goals. At the same time, culture is one major determinant of people’s perception. In such words, conflicts are closely related to culture where people are living in.
What is culture
As mentioned above, culture is a key to conflict and conflict resolution. But what is the “culture” exactly referring to? The word “culture” has more than a hundreds of definitions. By Hofstede (1980), he defined “culture as a collective programming of the mind which distinguishes one group from another”. And he also stated that culture is a slow process of growing into society. The content of culture are included the following four elements, learning values (dominant beliefs and attitudes), partaking of rituals (collective activities), modeling against heroes (role models), and understanding symbols (myths, legends, dress and jargon). These ingredients of culture are acquired from birth and are influenced by school, peers, religion,
What are the main sources of conflict in cross-cultural management within an international organization?
Introduction
The boundaries between countries become less obvious and important today, people getting much closer than ever before. The whole world seems united into a single unit, and these changes are all brought by “Globalization”. International organization are also one of the products which produced by globalization. Working within a multi-national firm, it is unavoidable to work with people speaking different language, living with different culture. These cultural differences are always the main sources of conflict in the workplace.
What is conflict
Before the discussion of sources of conflict, we need to firstly know what conflict is.
According to Kevin Avruch (1998), “Conflict is competition by groups or individuals over incompatible goals, scarce resources or the sources of power needed to acquire them.” Such competitions are determined by the people’s perception to power, resources and goals. At the same time, culture is one major determinant of people’s perception. In such words, conflicts are closely related to culture where people are living in.
What is culture
As mentioned above, culture is a key to conflict and conflict resolution. But what is the “culture” exactly referring to? The word “culture” has more than a hundreds of definitions. By Hofstede (1980), he defined “culture as a collective programming of the mind which distinguishes one group from another”. And he also stated that culture is a slow process of growing into society. The content of culture are included the following four elements, learning values (dominant beliefs and attitudes), partaking of rituals (collective activities), modeling against heroes (role models), and understanding symbols (myths, legends, dress and jargon). These ingredients of culture are acquired from birth and are influenced by school, peers, religion,