How to treat cross-cultural management in international human resource management

Challenges of cross-cultural and cross-cultural differences to human resource management.

Although cross-cultural management is nothing new, it is still one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprises in transnational business activities today.

In cross-cultural human resource management, because the enterprise is a cross-regional, transnational, cross-political, cross-ethnic and cross-cultural economic entity composed of two or more multinational enterprises in the host country, the influence of cultural factors on multinational companies is all-round, systematic and whole-process. Cross-culture is the cultural difference between different groups, including three levels: the differences of background culture between the two countries, the differences of "corporate culture" style between the two companies and the differences of individual culture of employees. The differences and intersections of these three levels constitute the main content of cross-cultural management.

Cross-cultural differences, that is, cultural differences mainly refer to the cultural distance between the home country and the host country. According to some surveys, the major failures of multinational companies are often caused by ignoring cultural differences. According to the existing survey data, 1/3 overseas managers returned to China ahead of schedule when they failed to complete their tasks. In fact, this is mainly because multinational companies have not selected suitable candidates who have been trained in cultural differences to serve overseas. People are increasingly facing the challenge of cultural differences.

The influence of cultural differences on multinational companies is mainly manifested in the following two aspects:

1, the influence of cultural differences on decision-making. There are two possibilities: one is that decision makers often make value judgments on information from different cultural backgrounds according to their own cultural characteristics, which is more likely to happen in the management of multinational companies. People often make judgments and decisions consciously or unconsciously according to their own values and codes of conduct. The second is that people with different cultural backgrounds in the group have changed the decision-making mode.

2. The influence of cultural differences on interpersonal relationships. The influence of cultural differences on interpersonal relationships is mostly in the form of conflict, and different cultural models determine people's different communication methods. If the communicating parties have different cultural backgrounds, it will often increase communication barriers. Anthropologist Edward Twitchell Hall Jr's high-low background theory has done a lot of research on different ways of communication. Hall believes that in high-background culture, information transmission and communication are carried out through body language, up-and-down connections and scenes, and this process-oriented communication depends on the interpretation of the receiver. In low-background culture, most information is carried out through clear symbols such as language and characters, and the sender of information has the obligation to make the receiver understand the information correctly. Generally speaking, China people are cautious, shy, unsociable, unwilling to expose their feelings in public, and belong to the process-oriented communicative people. Westerners, especially Americans, are often communicators. Therefore, conflicts based on this are common in Sino-US joint ventures.