Leader in Globalized Workplace Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Leader in Globalized Workplace - Essay Example It is no coincidence that globalisation enables organisations to compete for scarce resources and customer preferences internationally. Globalisation leads to and facilitates reduced labor costs, lower costs of manufacturing and marketing, and greater demand for products and services, especially from the third world countries (Bartlett & Ghoshal 1989; Harris & Morgan 1996). Apparently, leaders working in global organisations need new skills and knowledge to manage these organisations through the global change. Unfortunately, in light of the emerging globalisation trends the significance of national culture gradually wanes. The absence of geographical boundaries erases the existing cultural differences among employees. Yet, it is at least wrong to assume that globalisation eradicates the effects of national cultures on individual level outcomes; this being said, leaders in globalised workplace need a cultural intuition and understanding of the main cultural conventions affecting their followers. Globalisation and culture: Hofstede assumptions and their limitations in globalised workplace National culture has always been one of the central measures of effectiveness in organisations. With the advent of international organisational forms, national culture has come to exemplify an important source of influences on individual employee outcomes and one of the central objects of organisation analysis. Hosftede’s model of cultural influences on organisations has become the seminal element in the evolution of cultural knowledge in organisation research. Since then, â€Å"most of the research on culture has focused on identifying the core cultural values that differentiate cultures† (Erez & Gati 2004, p.584). Hofstede (1980) and Schwarz (1999) are rightly considered as the gurus in the analysis of cultural values and their implications for organisational and workplace behaviours. Hofstede’s study of national culture is one of the most frequently cited works in the research of national culture and its effects on organisational performance. In 1980 Hofstede published the results of a broad survey of almost 120,000 personnel from a large multinational company in the U.S., where he proposed a system of the national culture dimensions to measure and predict the relationship between culture and employee performance in the workplace (Hannerz 1992; Hofstede 1980). The central implication of Hofstede’s study is that national cultures as clusters of shared norms, values, and beliefs greatly affect and actually predict the way employees act in the workplace. In other words, depending on the cultural belonging of the employees, his (her) workplace behaviours and reactions can be modeled in advance. For example, individuals born and operating in masculine culture are prone to value competition, performance and success, whereas those born in â€Å"feminine† cultures are more likely to value caring, warm social relationships, and quality of life (Hofstede 1980; Leung 1989; Rohen & Shenkar 1986). The individualism-collectivism dimensions presented by Hofstede (1980) allow defining the degree to which employees are group- and socially-oriented (Chen, Chen & Meindl