A Critical review on the different perspectives of cross-cultural management

Organisations exist in an increasingly dynamic and changing environment and with the rapid technological advancement; internationalisation of businesses or globalisation has become an inherent part of organisational success. (Brooks, 2009).The globalisation of markets where the needs and the desires of the people all over the world have become homogenised and the globalisation of production where the highly developed economies are making use of the low wage countries have given more reasons for organisations to go global. There are different ways in which an organisation does business internationally, Foreign direct investment, Joint ventures and strategic alliances, Franchising etc. (Boddy, 2008). With the multinational and transnational companies having their manufacturing and marketing operations in different countries all over the world, and exerting direct and indirect control over it, the importance of cross cultural management has been realised in the recent years. The challenges and contemporary issues that managers face when they manage a culturally diverse workforce and the strategies they should adopt to deal with the cultural differences will be the focus of this study. The essay will start by comparing different national cultures by using instruments developed by Hall (1976) and Trompeenaar (1993) to bring out a few dimensions which differentiates cultures and then apply it to the Indian cultural context and find out the cultural dimensions India fits into and this cultural awareness of the Indian context will be followed by a discussion on how this impacts the leadership and management styles of international managers. The topic of leadership and its link to cross cultural management will be discussed using the behavioural theories of leadership and then applied to the Indian work context.