Cross-Cultural Management: Opportunities and Challenges

The management of people, material, and culture from a diversified background is called cross-culture management. Different cultures may originate in a family, neighborhood, state, country, and organization. We all tend to think, behave, and live with certain values, beliefs, norms, attitudes, eating, speaking, and dressing patterns, which we then follow normally as a routine in life. Cross-culture refers to people who differ in origin, religion, geography, nationality, race, ethnicity, age, language, gender, and sexual orientation. People of different cultures, when meet, their way of speaking, behaving, working, eating, and living all differ, and this may lead to disparity in opinion and understanding between them. If both individuals and parties learn to accommodate, adjust, respect, and listen patiently to each other’s viewpoints and behaviors, then there are fewer problems, and everything becomes amicable between them. When one assumes his culture is superior to others, then clashes or differences occur. This occurs mainly when one has minimal knowledge and cultural understanding of the world or sheer arrogance and attitude on one’s part. Cross-culture management plays a vital role here in the efforts to bridge the cultural gaps between two or more people, parties, organizations, and countries by trying to negotiate, mediate by gestures, goodwill, etiquette, behaviors, and languages. Communication 32 Integrating New Technologies in International Business plays a very important and strategic part here and is the fundamental link between the two entities. Cross-culture communication originates when people from different social, cultural, and geographical backgrounds try to converse with each other in similar or different ways. So as we learn to communicate, we also learn about each other’s culture in close tandem, influencing our behavior and the words we speak.