Development in a Cultural Perspective Essay

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organizations increasingly global diverse nature, leaders work develop a cultural mindset diversity thrive decreasing productivity. In assignment, address development implementation a cultural mindset a diverse global group employees.

Cultural Mindset Development

Companies' employees in a European country must work together with their employees in an Asian country. Cultural differences between these countries are important, and they influence relationships between employees, but also their efficiency and productivity. Therefore, it is in companies' best interest to ensure a cultural mindset that allows diversity while not affecting people's productivity.

Integrating Perspectives

Much of the work in integrating different perspectives in the attempt to become successful in a culturally diverse society relies on the leader. One of the most important skills of leaders relies on their ability to integrate varied perspectives within their team, workplace, or company (Romanenko, 2012). This is because culturally diverse environments provide varied opinions on most issues addressed by the company. Business views are influenced by culture, customers' attitudes' towards products are influenced by culture, and employee interrelationships are influenced by culture.

The main challenge in this case is to determine employees to accept points-of-view, ideas and perspectives that are different from their own. Most problems determined by cultural diversity can be attributed to the fact that people do not accept each others' diversity. Once an acceptance level is reached, it is easier for employees to understand different points-of-view. This also ensures a reduced number of conflicts within the workplace.

In order to reach this objective, it is important that leaders focus on developing a cultural mindset where the needs of all employees are addressed. Employees in culturally diverse workplaces must feel that they are understood by the company they work for and that their culture is important to the company in case. In addition to this, leaders must ensure that everyone understands that each employee's opinion is valuable.

There are several types of integration that leaders can address. These refer to structural integration and informal integration. In the case of structural integration, the company in case makes a voluntary effort into integrating cultural diversity within the organization. All structures off the company must ensure they integrate cultural diversity based on the strategy developed by the leader (Cox, 1994). This is a formal approach to integrating cultural diversity, and a more efficient one. This is because it requires effort from all structures, making it difficult for certain structures not to work on the integration issue. Informal integration usually does not rely on an organizational level strategy. In this case, each structure of the organization has its own strategy for integrating cultural diversity. This is not as efficient because it does not rely on joint effort of company structures.

Negotiation Strategies

When developing a common cultural mindset, leaders must be careful regarding the strategy they use (Sanibel, 2009). This is because strategies are also culturally sensitive. In other words, each culture negotiates in different ways in comparison with other cultures. It is important that leaders focus on negotiation strategies that can be applied to the different cultural factors that influence their organization.

Leaders must identify the objectives of these negotiation strategies. These objectives can refer to identifying common values, identifying factors that ensure team building within cultural diversity, integrating a minority in a successful culturally diverse environment, and others. Indentifying the correct objectives ensures leaders develop strategies that can help develop a common cultural mindset.

Leaders must then focus on identifying the different groups affected by the cultural integration. This is another important issue that the negotiation strategy must address. By identifying these groups, the leader can study them and understand their needs and preferences, and what it is that differentiates each group from another group. The negotiation strategy must also focus on identifying agreement points. These are common issues that the different groups can agree on (Janssesns et al., 2010). Although these are numerous differences between these groups, there are also similarities.
These are the issues that the negotiation strategy must focus on, helping the organization's members understand that they are not really that different and that there are issues they can easily agree on. The problem with developing a common cultural mindset is that many people and structures prefer to focus on differences, instead of on similarities.

The negotiation strategy regarding cultural integration must ensure that it addresses several levels. These levels refer to organization's members' environment, behaviors, abilities, beliefs, values, and company identity. In other words, integration must take place on each of these levels in order to be successful. Leaders can use a top to bottom or a bottom to top approach. In the case of the bottom to top approach, leaders start by focusing on cultural integration on environmental level. This refers to developing a culturally diverse workplace.

The behavior level integration ensures that the different behavior of the organization's members' are understood and agreed on by other members. The abilities level must reveal the fact that cultural diversity can provide numerous benefits to the company and its employees. This refers to different points-of-view and ideas that can determine innovation, different skills that employees can have in accordance with their culture. The beliefs level refers to what the different cultures of employees determine them to believe. Some of these beliefs might be true or false for other cultures, but this does not mean that they should change them.

Values are very important when integrating cultural diversity. This is because individuals' values strongly reflect their culture. Therefore, values must not be changed, but integrated. If employees understand that the company accepts their values, they are likely to increase their tolerance regarding the values of culturally different groups. Another important issue refers to the identity of the company. If the company establishes an identity of ensuring cultural diversity, this is likely to determine employees to behave as if they share the values of such a company identity.

The top to bottom approach seems to be more effective in such cases. This is because the culturally diverse identity of the company determines members to adapt to the values required by such an identity. This requires that employees build some beliefs on what they need to do in order to be a member of this culturally diverse environment. Their abilities and behaviors will derive from these beliefs. The environment is then modified in accordance with the other levels. In the case of the bottom to top approach, integration begins with the environment level. This is not as efficient in such cases because the cultural integration is not motivated by the identity of the company.

Communication Methods

The success of cultural diversity integration also depends on communication. Companies that want to develop a culturally diverse environment must also focus on the communication methods they use in sending the correct information to the interested parties. This is more important in the case of mergers, joint ventures, and acquisitions between companies in different countries and cultures.

In order to successfully communicate with culturally diverse recipients it is important to understand their culture, and to identify the preferred communication methods of each culture. The most frequently used communication methods are oral, written, and body language. In the case of oral communication, this depends a lot on language. In culturally diverse environments determined by mergers, joint ventures, and acquisition it is likely that several languages are spoken in that environment (Boje, 2001). It is also likely that not everyone speaks those languages. Therefore, oral communication is not the best solution in such cases. Body language is also not the best method in such cases because the interpretation is different in these cultures. Written communication is the most efficient communication method that should be used in culturally diverse environments. It is important that leaders understand the influence of communication on productivity.

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