Cross-culture

Cross culture in the business world refers to a company’s efforts to ensure that its people interact effectively with professionals from other backgrounds. Like the adjective cross-cultural, it implies a recognition of national, regional, and ethnic differences in manners and methods and a desire to bridge them.

Culture is a way of thinking and living whereby one picks up a set of attitudes, values, norms and beliefs that are taught and reinforced by other members in the group. This set of basic assumptions and solutions to the problems of the world is a shared system that is passed on from generation to generation to ensure survival. A culture consists of unwritten and written principles and laws that guide how an individual interacts with the outside world. Members of a culture can be identified by the fact that they share some similarity. They may be united by religion, by geography, by race or ethnicity.

Our cultural understanding of the world and everything in it ultimately affects our style of communication as we start picking up ways of one’s culture at around the same time we start learning to communicate.  Culture influences the words we speak and our behaviour.

International Human Resource Management

Culture as well as economy are interacting and in reciprocal influencing relationship. The same is the case of organizational and national culture. Companies that plan to operate in more countries have to decide to what extend to localize their organizational culture and managerial practices in order to fit in context of host country and contrary on which markets they should strive for setting of unified standards. Some systems (such as technology) have technical or economic character and therefore they are not connected to home country of the company and influenced by it. In addition there exist activities where character of national culture affects several fields in company; from organizational structure, across leadership management style and their decision making and communication, expectations of roles in firm, to motivation of employees. As impact of this influence it is possible to observe how national culture is interconnecting with organizational culture. If people in the organization share the same values and norms of behaviour, working in such environment is going without problems. However there is mostly tendency of simultaneous operation of more cultures, organizational or cultural ones, and creation of subcultures. That development is naturally caused by different functional divisions or separated units by localization with missing contact.