Cross Cultural Management - Essay Example

From management’s perspective, employees are considered the most important assets for the company and it is the quality of the employees that makes the business successful. In order to be successful, employees are offered with training and their skills are developed through different programs to achieve certain objectives. Training and development provide prime opportunities for the management to motivate their employees and at the same time enhance the knowledge and skills of the employees.

This not only motivates the employees but also encourages them to increase their productivity for accomplishment of organizational objectives (Henry, 1995). Training and development are crucial for every business as skilled and motivated workforce can support the business to achieve its goals in a more productive manner. It is essential that the employees possess knowledge and skills so that their performance should be at optimal level. As in an organization, there are people from different cultural backgrounds and, thus, cross cultural training is one of the key elements today to reduce the cultural differences among employees working together (Bratton, & Gold, 2009).

Organizations recruit individuals from different backgrounds; it becomes important for them to conduct cross cultural training programs and it helps in understanding cultural differences of people working together (Price, 2007). Emirates can be seen as one of the best examples of successful business in the world and the main reason for their success is focusing on the efficiency of the workforce. Being the best, Emirates spends about 5 to 6 percent of their revenue on training and development of their employees which enables the employees to be regarded as one of the best.

Emirates hires people from different backgrounds and they conduct different cross cultural programs so that these people from diverse cultural backgrounds can work together. Emirates Airline has its own training facility specially built to train and develop the employees by allowing them to share their opinions and ideas, hence, expanding the knowledge of each individual and changing their behavior according to the requirements of the organization (Redman, & Wilkinson, 2009). Another example for successful business is McDonalds which is operating in different parts of the world and people from different cultural background work at McDonalds; this has been one of the main reasons for success of the company.

McDonalds offers training to their employees on a continuous basis. McDonalds focuses on training and development of its employees according to the culture of the region they are operating in and at the same time they offer cross cultural training. According to McDonalds, their success lies in the employees (The Times, 2012) With increasing diversity in the organizations, organizations have been investing in cross cultural training programs. This report will analyze two theories related to cultural differences and their impact on the performance of employees in organizations: Geert Hofstede cultural management theory and Trompenaars and Hampden Model.

Geert Hofstede cultural management theory Geert Hosfstede’s has presented five dimensions to analyze the cultural differences and these dimensions have been applied on how it can influence the training and development programs. Power distance Power distance can be defined as how people accept that