Introduction: Being a Leader in the Globalised Environment
Being a leader of an international, diverse organisation presupposes handling a range of culture-related conflicts. Because of the need to transfer into the realm of intercultural communication and the lack of skills required for being successful at the specified negotiations, a company may fail to attain the goals set in the action plan. For the organisation to be efficient in its intercultural communication processes, the adoption of a mixed leadership style and the focus on compromise in communication must be viewed as the basic method of conversing with partners and company members.
Culture Clash and Possible Obstacles in Communication
First and most obvious, the environment of a diverse organisation involves communication between the representatives of different cultures; the given scenario may result in a range of conflicts unless every member of the staff is instructed on the methods of communicating with the people belonging to different ethnicities and cultures. However, even in the latter case, accidents still may happen, as becoming entirely immersed into the culture or cultures of the people that the organisation has to get in touch with is nearly impossible (Gartside & Sloman, 2014).
An efficient leader must be aware of the specified problems and be able to prevent them from occurring within the organisation. Though one might argue that the specifics of the communication styles adopted by the company personnel pertain to the character traits of the staff, i.e., should be viewed from the perspective of an individual, the leadership approach adopted by the company leader and the managers seems to have the definitive impact on the success of intercultural communication. Limbare (2012) points at the necessity for the company leader in incorporating the features of various leadership styles, including the missionary and compromiser styles, to manage the emerging conflicts efficiently. Particularly, the integration of the appeasement conflict management style with the compromise and negotiation approaches to conflict management (Limbare, 2012, pp. 173–174) deserve an honourable mention as some of the most efficient methods of helping the opponents reconcile.
Cohesion between Departments and Overall Performance Efficacy
In addition to the culture mentioned above clash as a possible impediment for a successful operation of the company, the threat of losing cohesion in the actions of different departments of the company can be viewed as a major problem. There is no need to stress that information transfer rarely occurs without any major issues even within a small organisation, not to mention a diverse corporation with a range of departments and affiliates located in several countries. The process of data transfer in the latter scenario becomes even more difficult under the influence of the possible language or culture-related issues and the resulting misinterpretation of information. In other words, the environment of a diverse organisation creates the premises for a range of misconceptions in the course of the communication process, which a manager must foresee and prevent (Gartside & Sloman, 2014).
The issue, as mentioned above, is, in fact, the breeding ground for most conflicts to occur within the context of communication in an organisation. Even when having enough information about the specifics of the partners’ culture, the employees working within a specific department may experience issues when interpreting or merely receiving a certain message sent by the staff of another department. As a result, a range of misunderstandings may emerge, therefore, causing numerous conflicts and preventing the company from operating efficiently.
The Conflicts within an Individual in the Organisational Setting
Eventually, one must touch upon the issue of information systems as the environment, in which premeditated data transfer occurs. To be more specific, the role of the employees in the mechanism of the system mentioned above and the resulting lack of self-importance can be considered one of the greatest problems in the diversified realm, as it presupposes dealing with the intrapersonal conflicts, i.e., the conflicts between different aspects of an individual’s self.
On a more complex level, the existing information systems that an organisation may use as the methods of entering the information transfer process can be viewed as the complex adaptive systems, or CAS (Madden, Duchon, Madden & Plowman, 2012, p. 692). Defined as a combination of “highly interactive, interdependent agents who learn and adapt to produce behaviours that would not be predicted by observing the system’s past” (Madden et al., 2012, p. 693), the specified concept allows for a shift in the information distribution processes towards making data available to all those concerned, which, in its turn, allows inferring that the spontaneous generation of orders and, as a result, spontaneous self-organisation (Madden et al., 2012). In other words, the specified systems, when maintained properly, serve as the indispensable tool for shaping employees’ self-discipline, thus, motivating them and helping them develop personal and professional responsibility.
Conclusion: The Art of Being a Leader
Being a leader means searching for ways of solving conflicts within the organisational setting. In a range of cases, the solutions to these conflicts presuppose using devious ways of approaching the problem. Because of the introduction of the cultural factor into the relationships between the members of a corporation in the global economic environment, the need to solve the emerging issues on several levels, including the interpersonal, the intercultural and the individual ones, appears. For this purpose, the integration of several types of leadership strategies and the incorporation of a range of conflict management approaches are required. As long as the company manager is capable of locating the solution that satisfies both sides and is compatible with the company’s values, the organisation may exist in the global economic environment.
Reference List
Gartside, D & Sloman, C 2014, ‘Adapting to a workforce without borders,’ T+D, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 37–40.
Limbare, S 2012, ‘Leadership styles and conflict management styles of the executives,’ The Indian Journal of Industrial relations, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 172–180.
Madden, L, Duchon, D, Madden, T & Plowman, D 2012, ‘Emergent organisational capacity for comparison,’ Academy of Management Review, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 689–708.