Question

IHRM in Action Case 2.1 Establishing a branch of a family business in China A family-owned carbon steel company from Germany has extended its business to Hong Kong. The owners bought a small traditional Chinese firm and decided to copy the successful structure they had developed at home. This struc- ture was headed by three general managers who equally shared the responsibilities for the business activities of the firm. The consequences were as follows. 1 Now the Chinese employees were assigned tasks by people they have never seen before and whom they did not understand. Many misunderstandings occurred, some were quite costly. 2 The employees back in Europe were only concerned with whether the assigned tasks were completed and did not consider any other obligations to the Chinese employees, such as taking care of the relationships with the Chinese government, banks, etc. Eventually, the local employees became frustrated and were ready to leave the company. 3 The result was that the management model was changed again and a single managing director of the subsidiary was accountable for all business activities in Hong Kong. Discussion Questions: 1 Relate the described situation to one of the cultural dimensions identified by Hofstede. How can you explain it? 2 How does this situation compare to comparable situations in your home country? What are the limits of a cultural explanation?

Answer 1

Answer :

1) :- Relate the described situation to one of the cultural dimensions identified by Hofstede. How can you explain it?

The above situation depends on the aspect of individualism and collectivism as is portrayed as one of the cultural dimension by Hofstede. Presently the Chinese community is that of collectivism based where individuals are attached to their root groups. They esteem relationship and tightly coordinated society. The European community is all the more inexactly coordinated and they are higher on the individualism aspect and consequently they care about the outcomes more than stakeholder management. This hole has brought about the sort of situation where the Chinese employees are feeling such difficulties and are getting frustrated.

2) :- How does this situation compare to comparable situations in your home country? What are the limits of a cultural explanation?

In my home country Egypt a comparable situation happened when we who were high on collectivism were related with coastal group which were high on individualism. The distinction here was that we were on the management side. This prompted a ton of inappropriate repercussions as individuals coastal felt the idea of our management as excessively meddling and this prompted a great deal of conflicts while our management was making some tough memories to understand that their inclusion was being taken in an off-base way. The arrangement that was later concocted was that a great deal numerous connection summons were finished with and an arrangement of management by targets was applied and imbibed.The cutoff points of cultural clarifications are identified with the presence of economic clarifications. The aspect to be noted here is that most situations are identified with economic reasons and subsequently to obviously characterize when the open decisions were identified with cultural issues is difficult to characterize.