MANAGING DIVERSITY + RELIGION IMPLICATION FOR INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

Diversity is also a topic that organizations have to take into account; it is the variation of social and cultural identities among people existing together in a defined employment or market setting (Cox 2001).

image source: http://www.ymcacambridgekw.ca/en/culturaldiversity/CDwhoweare.asp

And even diversity is good factors inside an organization, talking about the most different organizations are, most ideas recollected inside the organization, but at the same time, it has difficulties when there is a lot of diversification inside a company because it means that is going to be more difficult to get an agreement.

All people are totally different it means in all organization have diversity of people, I mean diversity in age, ethnicity, education, leadership styles, and even religion diversity.

However, inside organizations it is very important to take into account those differences between personnel, and headmaster of those companies have to manage those diversities inside the company to make them be a competitive advantage.

image source: http://www.waycoolpeople.com/news/LTM.htm

QUESTION:

Since diversity is a source of competitive advantage, what could be the recruitment strategies to effectively target to diverse groups? What would be the consequences of ignoring diversity?

To maintain well-established a diversity group the most important thing is the communication, this is my opinion because as I have already said, every person is different and communicating you must get an agreement or just make others understand what you are thinking about, without communication in diverse groups, the organizational environment would become heaviest and afterward employees would feel a not well environment. Another strategy to effectively target to diverse groups is to understand other necessities an others motivation, and understand not everyone wants the same I want and everyone is looking or their own goals, so it turns to a competence between member if an organization.

RELIGION:

 image source: http://www.kalipedia.com/fotos/lideres-religiosos-diferentes-paises.html?x=20070718klpprcryc_716.Ies

Religion plays a very important role inside interaction between human, and despite the enormous quantity of religions, it is a topic that organizations can’t ignore when they are choosing their organizational strategies. There are countries that are religion homogeneous as Latin American countries, but there are some countries that have diversity of religions in which the population must fight for make respect their ideas or beliefs.

Religion become a stronger topic during globalization processes, because it might be an obstacle talking about doing businesses with a country that has totally different beliefs, and most of the international negotiations that fail is because the negotiators don’t take into account religion factors. That’s why when someone pretend to do a business with a completely different culture or religion he/she have to be sure what is well seen for this culture and what is not.

QUESTION

What is the dominant religion in Colombia? What are the religious implications for doing business here? Give examples.

Colombia is a very homogeneous country I mean, according to CIA factbook, 90% of the population of Colombia is Roman Catholic, and just 10% of the population living in Colombia is from others religions, it makes our business become easier inside the country because almost all people have the same culture and the same beliefs.

What happen with people doing business in Colombia? In my own opinion, Colombia is not a problematic country to make business, to the contrary Colombian are open-minded, and they have no rules established to make businesses so foreigners must feel comfortable when they are doing businesses here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Ely, R. and Thomas, D. (2001) “Cultural Diversity at Work: The Effects of Diversity Perspectives on Work Group Processes and Outcomes,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2001, pp. 229–273.

Demographic Diversity, Conflict, and Work Group Outcomes: An Intervening Process Theory

  Building an Inclusive Diversity Culture: Principles, Processes and Practice.Nicola M. Pless, Thomas Maak. Journal of Business Ethics . Vol. 54, No. 2 (Oct., 2004), pp. 129-147.

Jamieson, D. and O’Mara, J. (1991) Managing workforce 2000: Gaining the diversity advantage

COMUNICATION AND VIRTUAL TEAM

retrieved from:http://homepage.mac.com/ata.25/Representatives.html

In all human life, communication is necessary to make others understand what I’m thinking or what I want to do. And humans have been responsible to create too many forms to communicate without talking; it is called non-verbal communication like, gesticulation, your face and body movements, and this kind of communication (non-verbal) its maybe the most important because you can transmit your feelings.

 retrieved from: http://www.clipartheaven.com/show/clipart/technology_&_communication/general/worldwide_communication-gif.html

Communication processes are the most important factor inside organizations, because depends on how good or how bad the communication is, the work environment become to be a opportunity or a threat. It is important to take into account the role of the communicator (the one who send the message) and the receiver role the one who understand and pay attention to the communicator), if there is a good transmission of the ideas and a good listener of those ideas, there is going to be a good communication. Although there are other barriers that make not improve the communication, those barriers are: Physical separation, Status differences, Gender differences, Cultural diversity, Language.

We have already talk about non verbal communication and the importance of those forms of communication in human life, in the following video and expert of bogy communication is going to explain the body communication and the importance of it in work life, what you must to do and what you havent to do. 

VIRTUAL TEAM

retrieved from: http://www.foothillglobalaccess.org/orientation/course_layout.htm 

In nowadays globalized world begin the necessity to construct virtual teams, those teams are a group of people working together by having some distance, distance which make the work and the development of their goals, a difficult thing.

With the technology that we have already count on, this virtual teams are more common and sometimes they are more competitive than normal teams. They work with too many sources such as internet conferences, phone calls and emails, so they have to be constantly communicated because they can’t see each other every day as a normal team does.

On the other hand, virtual teams used to have more than one barrier of communication, because most of the times these kind of teams contains people from different countries, so cultural factors become a huge barrier to make a business or just to have an agreement, that why the participant of those teams have to take into account cultural factors to make a good business environment.

QUESTION:

Accroding to Kuruppuarachchi (2009), what benefits and problems arise as a consequence of the creation of virtual team? Identify five each. Based on this, explain how to make the transition from a more traditional team structure to the more distributed team structure?

According to Kuruppuarachchi there are some positive and some bad consequences about virtual teams. About positive ones he highlight some bullet points, first he said virtual tams save time because they don’t need time to move to another places to interact with others participant of the teams, the might use all resources, and these kind of teams have the opportunity for developing team work skills, easy sell project and good internal relationships.

But he also talked about some negative issues about virtual team, those are: difficult quality control, members cant interact each other because of the virtual issue, its not be a permanent team, and maybe some members may not be psychologically fit for virtual teams, and finally huge cultural differences might be a big obstacle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Kuruppuarachchi, P. R. (2009). Virtual team concepts in projects: A case studyBlackwell Publishing Ltd. Retrieved fromhttp://search.proquest.com/docview/218750033?accountid=45662

Powell, A ., G. Piccoliand B. Ives (2004) Virtual teams : a review of current literature and directions for future research. The Data base for Advances in Information Systems , 35: 6-36.

 Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa, Dorothy E. Leidner. Organization Science. Vol. 10, No. 6, Special Issue: Communication Processes for Virtual Organizations (Nov. - Dec., 1999), pp. 791-815

Network Structure in Virtual Organizations. Manju K. Ahuja, Kathleen M. Carley. Organization Science Vol. 10, No. 6, Special Issue: Communication Processes for Virtual Organizations (Nov. - Dec., 1999), pp. 741-757

The role of workers+ migrant workers + expatriates

Since long time ago, when the globalization processes started to cover all the world, so on the world started to unify their boundaries, the human migration rate started to increase constantly year per year.

These rates are constantly increasing for many reasons, most of the time, is because migrants want to look for opportunities in other countries, work opportunities or just to improve their quality of life.

Migration is a concept that people used to compare with expatriates, but there are too many differences between both concepts, in the following squares you must understand such differences.

By having clear both concepts, people ask their self, how migration rates, but even more how expatriates rates can help or threaten a certain country. Off course expatriates are very important to the economy of a country, because they are the ones who work and teach to companies new forms of business or the market tendencies, but it also represent a threaten talking about the professionals, well-prepared inside this country that were losing the opportunity to show their abilities.

QUESTION: Explain how easy is it for Colombian companies to employ expatriates locally? Give examples.

QUESTION: Explain how easy is it for Colombian companies to employ expatriates locally? Give examples.

Some articles of the Colombian Constitution argued that all companies resided in Colombia has to  prefer national employees more than expatriates, this article pretend to protect even more our national intellectual capital.

But it doesn’t mean that expatriates in Colombia are not welcome, opposite all expatriates living in Colombia were supposed to have a good job, and I really think that expatriates might be well paid than nationals because most of the used to be well prepared.

It is important to include that here in Colombia, most in Medellin city, we have a lot of foreign companies established here, and therefore it is another cause of the huge amount of expatriates living here.

The universities are also very interested to employ this kind of personnel, because universities are very interested in develop multilingualism, a foreign mind about business, or not just business, develop foreign technologies and most important they want to develop KNOWLEDGE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

  -Migration, Knowledge and Social Interaction: Expatriate Labour within Investment Banks Jonathan V. Beaverstock Area Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 459-470.

 
-Migrant workers and well-off expatriates.Hasan Mahmud. FE financial express. may 2010. Retrieved from: http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/search_index.php?news_id=13439&page=detail_news

-Migrant workers vs expatriates - glaring double standards. March 2009. Retrieved from: http://anilnetto.com/democracy/human-rights/migrant-workers-vs-expatriates-our-double-standards/

Florida, R. (2002) The rise of the creative class. The Washington Monthly, 34(5), 15.Retrieved from: http://search.proquest.com/docview/213679959?accountid=45662

MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

IMAGE SOURCE: http://www.crfonline.org/orc/pdf/ref4.pdf

Change is a different or an undergo alteration during the life of any object and every day, every minute and even every second the world are changing and you don’t noticed that issue.

As every object is changing constantly, the environment do it as well, therefore it is a vey important issue that companies have to take into account because how everything change, customers, suppliers, and competitors mind.

There is also organizational change, It could be a planned change, or even an Unplanned change inside organizations, and it is the second one, the most worrying issue because an unplanned change is the one that is imposed on the organization and is often unforeseen. That’s why companies have to be prepared for all of those unplanned changes inside or outside the organization, for that reason Change Agents become very important. They have the function to undertake the task of introducing and managing a change in an organization; these agents might be internal (part of the organizational structure) or subcontracted agents.

To managing change, consist on fight against basic aspects that affect organizations welfare such as the organizational strategies, technologies and structures, having all of them new problems new situations to coordinate and make them be an opportunity, not a threat or a conflictive issue. It means that when companies are well prepared for change, everything is going to be an opportunity.

IMAGE SOUCE: http://www.soydemac.com/2009/12/11/apple-regresa-con-think-different/

When change become into some conflicts, it has positive and negative consequences for the enterprise, the positive consequences might be leads to new ideas, stimulates creativity, motivates change, promotes organizational vitality, helps individuals and groups establish identities serves as a safety valve to indicate problem, but the negative consequences are also very important, those are: Diverts energy from work, threatens psychological wellbeing, wastes,  resources, creates a negative climate, breaks down group cohesion, can increase hostility and aggressive behaviors.

IMAGE SOURCE: http://www.ntn24.com/node/6341 

For the reason that change is a very important topic in organizational development, specialists create some theories to recommend how to manage change, some theories like forces Field Analysis on Dr Lewin that consist on obtain an equilibration between the forces of change and the forces of status quo, that is the first and the most understandable theory. Those applied theories help enterprises to get competitive advantages, therefore they become competitive.

Finally, in the following video Dr James Q is going to explain us basic factors to organizational change management steps.

 image source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w0w-txLTws

QUESTION:

Is it possible to change corporate culture? If so, how?

Yes i think is posible to change a culture inside a corporation because this huge companies are vulnerable to all those globalization changes. How? By we mentioned before there are a lot of factors that implement changes, customer and consumers necessities are ones of the most important issue inside the change of corporate culture, they have to start to operate according to the consumers need, therefore, it implies a re-organization of their cultural strategies.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY:

-Managing for Innovation. Virtual book. Building effective implementations mechanism. Page 345. Retrieved from: http://books.google.com/books?hl=es&lr=&id=G2TnfLan6osC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=manage+organizational+change&ots=oDs-CXa5MS&sig=JJMcxdIhort3FzuYIpmnE0NLHUc#v=onepage&q=manage%20organizational%20change&f=false

-Managing Organizational Change. By Michael W. Durant, CCE, CPA. Retrieved from: http://www.crfonline.org/orc/pdf/ref4.pdf

-Hendry, Chris, Understanding and Creating Whole Organizational Change Through Learning Theory, Human Relations, 1996, 49, 621 – 639

-Vaill, Peter B., Managing as a Performing Art, San Francisco: Jossey - Bass Publishers, 1991.

-Galpin, Timothy, Connecting Culture to Organizational Change, HRMagazine, 1996, 41, 85 – 90

THE ROLE OF MERGING IN ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

M&A or well known as Mergers and Acquisitions refer to the concept of corporative strategies, used by the executives of big enterprises to combine or acquire other enterprises or other assets. Companies do these strategies in order to reach goals of like for example expansion, enter easier to a market (especially another country), among others.

Merger is the union of two or more independent companies, who decide to join together their capital and their patrimony to set up a new company, bigger than each independent company. On the other hand Acquisitions consist on the purchase of the stock package of other legal person (other company), without merging their capital.

There are some obstacles for merging and acquisition processes, and even more when the M&A process is going to take place with enterprises located in different countries, some of these obstacles are:

•  problems of cultural integration between both participant companies.
• Overestimate the synergies.
•  Excessive prices.
• Incorrect definition of the objectives of both enterprises
• Higher expectancies 
• Governmental influences

That’s why most of the times, the idea of M&A are not well received by workers of the organizations, because it implies a lot of organizational behavior changes inside the company and it may decrease workers motivation, or just different values and beliefs about the work place between workers from both enterprises, and as a result of all, there would be caused a decrease of company’s performance. In now days, M&A process become easier than before as a consequence of all of technology and globalization issues that we have in the actuality, it means that because of these issues, enterprises and organizations in all the world have changed their mind in terms of inside policies, so most of the companies around the world use similar structure so it become a better environment of work when two organization decide to integrate each other.

QUESTION:

According to “Merger & Aquisition and Growth Advisors to Credit Unions” there are 7 steps that companies in acquiring process have to do. Those are the steps: 

image source:http://www.ceoadvisory.com/page.php?page=29

  BIBLIOGRAPHY:

New perspective for the management of M&A process: a merger case of a Japanese pharmaceutical company: Sotaro Shibayama, Kunihiro Tanikawa and Hiromichi Kimura. Retrieved from: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1906957

Challenges and opportunities in Merger and Acquisitions. Handbook of Organizations and cultures.

VOLVO fights to keep its cultura. Goliath Business Knowledge on demand. Retrieved from: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3529537/Volvo-fights-to-keep-its.html

The culture of Sweden.Kwintesential. Retrieved from: http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/sweden.html

Study on Enterprise Cultural Integration after Geely’s Acquisition of

Volvo Chen Xiaohui, Liao Haiyan School of Management, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, P.R.China, RETRIEVED FROM: http://www4.pucsp.br/icim/ingles/downloads/papers_2010/part_5/61_Study%20on%20Enterprise%20Cultural%20Integration%20after%20Geely_s%20Acquisition%20of.pdf

Challenges and opportunities in Merger and Acquisitions. Handbook of Organizations and cultures. 

ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING:

image source:http://www.verticalleapconsulting.com/framework.htm

Learning and knowledge are two terms that people used to confuse all the time because their uses are similar, but their concepts are totally different. Learning it’s the process to acquire knowledge, while knowledge is “human faculty resulting from interpreted information”

Nowadays, organizations are totally involved in the world of CHANGE, so their knowledge and their learning are very important to an enterprise development and performance. Therefore, all enterprises try to coach their employees to make them prepared for most of the changes made by the environmental sector to make the enterprise be more competitive and good performance.
image source:http://www.infed.org/biblio/organizational-learning.htm

Company’s know-how is considered one of the most important assets of the company because it is the asset that company uses to make different from other companies and be more successful than others. For example when is going to be purchase of a franchise of one company, the purchase consist on buying the know-how of a certain company, it could be a form of organizational learning.

IMAGE SOURCE:http://www.businessihub.com/learning-organization/

But each company can construct their own Know-How by organizational learning process. This process consists on “An organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights” (Garvin, 1993). As I had mentioned before, there is a nowadays concern about learning organizations and there is some causes about these concern, first because it is a factor of competitiveness because organizational learning help enterprises to survive in turbulent, it also help the enterprises to combat with other issues such as Uncertainty, changes in workforce competency, it also construct customer expectations, technological advantage, and fight with globalization that is the most important factor at the present time because it make have even more competitors than a few years ago.

It is clear that organizational learning is very important, but how a company can get it? According to Dr Senge there was five steps wich enterprises have to take to improve organizational learning, those are Personal mastery, shared vision, mental models team learning, systems thinking
IMAGE SOURCE:http://www.solonline.org/organizational_overview/

QUESTION:

What is the relationship between organizational learning and individual satisfaction?

There is a closed relation because organizational learning based on coaching the employees inside companies to increase the enterprise performance, subsequently all workers become benefit from organizational learning inside policies, taking into account that coaching workers is a good motivator for theme because it not just contribute to the company performance, it also contribute with the wellbeing and the rising of workers organizational knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

·         Learning in Organizations. INFEAD.  Retrieved from: http://www.infed.org/biblio/organizational-learning.htm

·         Teece, D. (1998) Capturing value from knowledge assets: The new economy, Markets for know-how, and intangible assets. California Management Review. Vol40 No 3. Spring 1998. Retrieved from January 2011: http://apps.business.ualberta.ca/mlounsbury/techcom/readings/teece.pdf

·         Nelson, D.L. & Quick, J.C. (2010) OrganizationalBehavior: Science, TheReal Worldand You. South-Western CollegePublication, 7th. Ed.

·         The Five Disciplines of Organizational Learning. SOL (society of organizational learning). Retrieved from: http://www.solonline.org/organizational_overview/

·         WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING?. PEGASUS COMUNICATION. INC. LEARNS MORE. Retrieved from: http://www.solonline.org/organizational_overview/