Introduction
Global Management Challenges
Sweeping changes across organizations and in the global business arena threaten to make yesterday’s managers outdated. However, an awareness of the changes and how to take advantage of them offer tomorrow’s managers countless opportunities. Even though the nature of managerial function varies across organizations and changes continually, one general thread pervades nearly all managerial activities.
That is, interacting with different people from different backgrounds and culture. Therefore, the behavior of people and management process in firms are clearly intertwined thus causing global management challenges to both the current and future leaders (Scheffknecht, 2011).
Conversely, the field of management is wide. It covers areas such as organizational change, culture, managing change initiatives and organizational activities. However, a new leader coming into an organization will have difficulties in changing the existing organizational culture. Employees may either forcefully reject or accept changes. Changes that take place in all organizations are nonetheless globally recognized phenomena.
Thus, for organizations to survive in the currently competitive market, they are compelled to adapt regularly to meet the changing environmental, social, political, economic, and business demands. Analyzing and changing the existing corporate culture and structure to meet such demands while the organization absorbs people, teams, and work groups from different backgrounds tends to generate different global management challenges to the universal and domestic managers.
The paper relates the wider field of global management challenges to the specific area of organizational culture and structure. It argues that a new leader coming into an organization and those on international assignments will have difficulties and challenges in analyzing teams, multicultural workgroups, organization structure, and culture. The paper explores the important environments that pose challenges to international leaders.
Challenges global managers face while analyzing multicultural work groups and teams
Organizational culture and the general social and cultural environments can be considered to interlock in that teams and workgroups enter organizations from the surrounding societies and bring their culture and social life with them. Therefore, the changing social and cultural environment influences corporate culture and is a big challenge to managers endeavoring to analyze and change the teams and work groups’ culture.
Forces in this multicultural environment are those that effect changes in how people live and work. Mohanty and Rath (2012) think that global managers must be responsive and analyze those multicultural changes that take place in the surrounding societies as they affect all aspects of multicultural work groups and teams culture. Nevertheless, new global managers analyzing teams and multicultural work groups will have little knowledge about those changes.
Workforce diversity is also a big challenge to global managers wishing to analyze and change the existing multicultural work groups and teams culture. In as much as an organization is legally and socially committed, it must include employees from different diverse environments.
However, some organizations are not sensitive to the diversity issue while others have overemphasized on the issue. In fact, the demographic composition of workers has changed considerably as more female, male and minorities enter the workforce. This means that new global managers must address this factor when analyzing multicultural work groups and teams.
Studies have shown that workforce diversity is an important resource to improve performance and that quality of decision-making is richer and broader in terms of diverse employees (Moran, Harris & Moran, 2010). While this is an important consideration to managers, the existing teams and work groups cultures discourage such efforts to an extent of justifying that diversification lowers the quality of management.
Challenges global managers confront when studying international organization in the areas of structure and culture
The global business environment is changing drastically thus requiring new approaches to business. Apart from the changes in regulations, diversity and consumer behaviors, the global economic factors have experienced significant economic changes thus influencing organization cultures and structure greatly.
For many international organizations, the focus is to create a culture and organization structure that might improve competitive advantages and eventually the profitability in a threatening economic environment. Firms including small-to-medium enterprises are internationalizing their operations in search of business opportunities thus making it difficult for global managers to study the culture and structure of such organizations (Schuler, 2000).
Today’s global managers studying the structure and culture international organizations are challenged by a myriad of factors stemming from the changing global environment.
First, cultural differences influence corporate culture in different countries. Management functions directed to corporate culture become more complex as the firm’s activities expand internationally, and coordination of organizational and decision-making issues becomes significantly difficult.
Managers fight in vain to create a corporate culture and structures that balances between the needs of the foreign markets and the impact of the cultural disparities on important organization issues such as evaluation, compensation packages, and promotion policies.
Second, understanding global difference is a challenge to new global managers in appreciating the changing global environment. To global managers, there are issues related to understanding corporate behavior in diverse global settings. Corporate culture becomes especially complicated at global level since the desires, attitudes and values of employees differ across countries (Moran, Harris & Moran, 2010).
Again, the issues of coordinating activities to match organizational environment become more complicated as firms expand internationally. Organizations are locating in a specific region because this permits them to increase efficiency, but this also affects corporate culture and structure.
Challenges global managers meet when evaluating international assignments
When evaluating international assignments, global managers always encounter numerous challenges. First, such managers must evaluate the cultural and social environments. At this point, the global managers are bound to assess the social life and cultural activities of people entering the organization from the surrounding societies.
Thus, the influence of cultural environments on the organization culture must be evaluated together with how multicultural groups and teams work and live. Besides, when evaluating their international assignments, global mangers must assess how workforce and organization managers respond to the changes happening in the neighboring communities and the manner in which they impact on the organization culture. However, global managers on international assignments seem to have slight information regarding such activities.
Second, the international business environment has been fluctuating quickly forcing managers to adopt novel business and management strategies in order to remain competitive in the global spheres.
The observed changes in the business arena in turn cause the organization corporate culture and structure to vary frequently. It therefore becomes difficult for global managers on international assignment to consistently gather information and evaluate the changing business operations assumed by international organizations (Franke & Nicholson, 2002).
Third, global learning or the process of attaining and learning the knowledge, skills and corporate behaviors that have helped organizations abroad to become strongly positioned in the global market is also a challenge to global managers evaluating international assignments.
Managers may be required to create a corporate culture that might allow the firm to rotate employees to other foreign operations in order to learn the opportunities and problems that lie overseas. No wonder many researches on expatriation have pointed the key challenge to successful expatriation as the capacity of the organization to create a culture that arms the employees with the necessary skills and knowledge to fit in foreign cultures (du Plessis & Beaver, 2008).
Challenges global managers meet when managing across cultures in the future
New global managers are tasked with the development of corporate ethics and well-being to initiate change and manage organization across cultures. Sims (2009) considers corporate ethics as one element of corporate culture that is hard to change, as ethics are defined differently by individual organizations.
While managing organizations across cultures in the future, global managers are likely to encounter unethical behaviors that damage the firm’s reputation and cost the firm the goodwill of employees and customers. Managers who wish to change such a culture are required to establish an ethical code that defines acceptable behaviors and develop a framework of rewards and punishments to implement ethical codes.
To some firms, social responsibility means doing any action provided it is legal. In such a culture, developing a code of ethics to protect the firm’s reputation and ensure the goodwill of employees and customers is hard for a newcomer managing an organization across cultures. The challenge is to build an organizational culture where members oppose the temptation to act in ethical manners that promote individual interests at the cost of the firm or promote the interest of the firm at the cost of the society.
Finally, almost every organization creates a culture that might make the employees across different more creative. The most significant driver to innovation is information technology and its integration in business operations. Whereas IT is important to organizational activities, it poses a major challenge to both today’s and future global managers (Cronley & Patterson, 2010).
Organizations are increasingly operating in uncertain, decentralized, networked environments, where adoption of IT becomes essential towards managing across different cultures. Unfortunately, many organizations do not have supportive culture that can enhance the willingness of cross-cultural employees to adopt new technologies.
Conclusion
Sweeping changes threaten to make yesterday’s managers outdated while an awareness of the changes and how to take advantage of them offer tomorrow’s managers countless opportunities. From the extensive research on corporate culture and structure, as well as multicultural work groups and teams, there are challenges and barriers facing global managers on international assignments wishing to change an existing organizational culture and structure.
These managers are vulnerable to different environments, national cultures, organizational trends and organizational behaviors adopted in particular firms. Emended in this research is the fact that people enter into organizations carrying cultures of the surrounding communities that also influence the existing corporate cultures and structures. As a matter of fact therefore, the managers are tasked with learning the societal cultures especially when most of the firms have internationalized their operations.
The paper points out that the changing social and cultural environments are exposing managers to myriad challenges related to organizational culture. A manager seeking to change an already changing culture has the responsibility of shifting the changes towards the core initiative. It is noted that the force of nature exerts much pressure on organizations to the disadvantage of management initiatives.
That is, if globalization is the trend towards winning competitive advantages, managers have no other option but to develop a culture that responds to such changes. Again, if technology adoption is the answer to successful business, then it must be a priority to the management. Unfortunately, very few corporate cultures will support such initiatives, hence high resistance towards such changes. The paper provides an extensive discussion on the difficulty of changing an existing culture characterized by developmental changes over time.
References
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