International Human Resource Management: Determining the Strategies for Effective Cross-Cultural Training

The internationalization of human resource management has increased the scope of traditional HRM. Today, HR practitioners not only manage people from their home country, but one that involve managing many diverse nationalities, with which the culture of staff and employees are already well-known or predicted. Companies start business within their country of origin and staff are hired from within that country. However, with the arrival of globalization and the shift from industrial to information technology, a new problem for HR practitioners emerged as employees become more diversified and hard to manage. Companies expand to other countries, or moreover participate in joint ventures or mergers and acquisitions. This move has many implications including the limited choice of hiring employees from the country which the company expanded. Basically, this gives HR practitioners a new challenge as they are faced with a diverse cross-cultural workforce that they are not yet familiar with. For instance, a UK or an American company expanded or having joint ventures in China would have to integrate their own HR practice in that country. However, the Chinese and Western managers have different beliefs and practices in terms of managing employees. Thus, a cross-cultural conflict might arise, which could affect the productivity and culture of the company as a whole, most especially in the branch they invested in China. Western expatriates might not be able to adapt with the Chinese way of working or any Asian way of working for that matter if they don 't have proper training or knowledge about them. This gives the HR team a huge responsibility in making sure that cross-cultural relationship within the company is going well. An HRM expatriate might have problems having the best local staff when they do not have enough knowledge about the foreign culture. Furthermore, productivity might also be affected if their way of human management is not compatible with the working nature of