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  • Essay / Managing a Culturally Diverse Workforce - 1970

    In today's fast-paced, highly integrated world, businesses have a growing need to hire and retain a workforce extremely diverse and multicultural. With increasing globalization, multinational companies enjoy a great advantage as they have the opportunity to work in different cultures and leverage a diverse pool of skills. However, working in a different culture comes with a significant cost. Various issues arise while managing a culturally diverse workforce and management must tackle these issues effectively. It is important to have a feel for different cultures as it helps improve employee efficiency and productivity. However, many problems arise when we conduct cross-cultural analysis. These problems arise due to our lack of understanding of other cultures and sometimes we ignore our own culture. This can lead to confusion about other cultures and we fail to fully understand it. This is a very serious problem that must be identified and addressed, as it causes serious distortions to the cultures we are trying to understand. The paper will highlight various theoretical and practical issues of cross-cultural management and include various recommendations to address these issues. CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT ISSUES The term culture is versatile and can be explained as a broad idea or concept. It is difficult to explain the term with a single definition, however, it can be defined as a set of values ​​that define a way of life for individuals and society. It explains what is good or bad and what is right or wrong in a particular society. Thus, culture is a system of values, which provides the ways of perceiving people, thought patterns and social relationships, which are useful in solving these problems. Although stereotypes and sophisticated schemas are a useful tool for understanding a culture, they are not enough. We need some advanced tools to completely understand a culture. One of the most essential elements is attributional knowledge as well as factual and conceptual understanding. It simply means understanding that credit should be given where credit is due, that is, a person should clearly understand that any characteristic can apply to anyone in a particular situation. This can be done through practice and using a step-by-step model of cultural understanding. A detailed description of the cultural sensemaking model was provided. By having a deep understanding of our own culture and considering context, we can better understand a different culture..