Human resource Management
When human civilization was in the
necessent stage, people were used to consume natural resources surrounding
them. With demographic changes and development of human society, human need
grown and to meet this growing need trade became a prominent mean. Initially,
people used to do trading among groups and in unstructured ways. Later, with
distinction among groups and geographical boundaries commercial procedures
evolved to satisfy growing human need. The people associated with these, became
business people and gradually their organization evolved as companies.
Previously these companies were confined
among their own regional and national boundaries. But growing competition among
themselves, they were forced to expand their businesses in other countries –
they become international.
These international companies entered host
countries, in many ways and most recently Joint Venture became very popular
because of its many benefits. In Joint Venture, two or more companies with
complementarily in operation and thinking come together to satisfy their
business needs and in most of the cases international joint ventures faces a
lot of human resource constraints because of different cultural and social
backgrounds of their parents.
We are now in the service economy and day
by day importance of people is becoming more prominent in managing business
operation and these are particularly more critical in operating an international
Joint Ventures. In an International Joint Venture the following picture is
prominent:
Human resource Management is about managing
human relations in individual and group level and human relation in the
interrelationship among people as they work together to achieve organizational
goal and attain satisfaction in terms of achieving their objectives. It
integrates knowledge from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and
anthropology. Psychology, the study of why people behave in certain ways, facilitates
understanding of learning, thinking, and developmental processes.
Sociology is an inquiry into how people
behave in-groups and focuses on the impact that groups have on their behavior.
By examining symbols and articrafts, anthropology studies culture of the past
and are concerned with discovering how past occurrences influence their
behavior. Human relations’ draws on knowledge of the behavior science, unify
this information, and apply it to the study of human interrelationships.
While assessing the Human Resource
Management principles in international companies, cultural issues are
considered with care, as they are the most crucial to the companies’ image and
define its identity.
Culture is acquired the knowledge that
people use to interpret experience and to generate social behavior. This
knowledge forms values, creates attitudes and influences behavior. Culture has
following characteristics:
Learned: Culture is not inherited or
biologically based. It is acquired by learning and experience
Shared: People as members of a group,
organization, or society share culture: it is not specific to single
individuals.
Transgenerational: Because culture is
shared and passed along from generation to generation, it is cumulative,
relatively stable and somewhat permanent. Old habits are hard to break, and
people tend to maintain its own heritage in spite of continuously changing
world
Symbolic: Culture is based on the human
capacity to symbolize or to use one thing to represent another
Patterned: Culture has structure and is
integrated. A change in one part will bring changes in another
Adaptive: Culture is based on the human
capacity to change or adapt, as opposed to the more genetically driven adaptive
process of animals. Culture is passed along from generation to generation, but
one should not assume that culture is static and immune to change. Far from
being the case, culture is constantly changing – it adapts itself to new
sources of knowledge.
Importance of culture
Today’s managers operate in a world, where
culture changes than any other period in human history. To survive and develop
managers need new skills to cope with these changes in their life styles.
Every manager should consider the
constraints imposed by the cultural context, because it is impossible to
coordinate the actions of people without a deep understanding of their values,
belief and expressions.
There are many ways of examining cultural
differences and their importance on management. Culture can affect managerial
attitudes, managerial ideology, and even business government relations.
There are four major dimensions of culture:
Power distance: is the extent to which less
powerful members of institutions or organization accept that power is
distributed unequally. A greater power distance indicates an accepted hierarchy
in organizational relationship, a smaller power distance relates to greater
participation in decision-making, and greater equality in the organization.
Uncertainty avoidance: is the extent to
which people feel threatened by ambiguous situations, and have created belief
and institution that try to avoid these. People with high uncertainty avoidance
try to limit conflict and risk taking.
Individualism – Collectivism: This
dimension relates to whether participants are concerned about their own needs,
goals and achievements or whether the social group norms and benefit take
precedence. Individualism is the tendency of people to look after themselves
and their immediate families. The collectivism is the tendency of people to
belong to groups or collectives and to look after each other in exchange for
loyalty.
Masculinity – Femininity: there is basic
dichotomy between the rational achievement orientation and the emotional
affiliation orientation. Masculinity is defined as a situation in which the
dominant factors in society are success and money. In contrary, femininity is
the term used to describe a situation in which the dominant values in society
are caring for others and the quality of life.
Human resource Management in International
Joint Ventures
While assessing HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
principles of overseas companies, we could consider the company culture in
three aspects:
Bureaucratic culture, technical culture and
managerial culture
Normally human resource management has the
following dimensions – and each of them has to be considered on those three
cultural aspects. The dimensions are:
Organization structure
Job Design
Delegating decision making authority
Control and assessment of performance
External competition
Internal Equity
Intensive components
Benefits and rewards
Job security
Career development
Table 1. Managing Human resource in
different culture
In the Bureaucratic In the Technical In the
Managerial
Culture Culture Culture
Structuring the Establish rational and Develop,
organize and Keep organization
Organization detailed organization chart obtain
consensus or structure minimal and to be
communicated interrelationships adaptive to changes throughout the organization
among functions
Designing jobs Formalize and standardize Formalize
Be flexible and job descriptions. Put relationships as formalize emphasis tasks to be accountabilities. Put accountabilities.
performed emphasis on processes Put emphasis on end to be adapted results to be
accomplished
Delegating Extremely limited Decision-making
must High degree of Decision delegation and freedom be mostly controlled delegation
and making are required freedom is
Authority supported
Controlling and Need for a heavy system Effective
cost Sophisticated
Assessing administrative checks and accounting
system control system
Performance balances to measure how is
required to measure is required to tasks
are performed. efficiency. Emphasis measure end Emphasis is on compliance is on qualitative results.
With standards and norms criteria Emphasis
is on quantitative criteria
External Usually minimal Moderate High competitiveness
Intensive None Limited High components
Internal equity Must be absolute and Limited.
Must reflect Fair. Must reflect normative. Must integrate balance of power job
value and seniority and diplomas among functions performance
Benefits Highly formalized and Formalized
and Informal and Common throughout personalized personalized the organization
Providing job Must be absolute Fair Minimal
security
Career Strict and objective Develop bridges
Reward high Development rules and procedures between functions to performers
through must be established for improve organizational rapid promotions
promotions and integration
career developments
A joint venture involves two or more
legally distinct organization, each of which shares in the decision making
process of the jointly owned entity. Joint venture is considered international
when one of partner in headquartered outside the venture’s country of operation
or the joint venture has significant level of operation in more than one
country.
Human resource management in Joint Venture
encounters many problems because the presence of two parties – two cultures
simultaneously. Since different cultures exist in the partnership, an
understanding of the impact of culture on managing is critical to the study of
joint venture management. If international managers do not know something about
the culture of the local country they deal with, the results can be quite
disastrous.
Motivation also contributes to the success
of International human resource management. Abraham Maslow proposed five levels
of human needs. The essence of this theory is the satisfaction of human needs,
which occur in hierarchical order ranging from the lowest level of survival to
selfactualization at the top of the hierarchy. Before people are motivated to
attain higher level needs, their lower-level needs must be fulfilled.
While considering the motivation level of
employees of the joint venture, the human resource manager has to take into
account the following issues:
Current living standards
Cultural characteristics of the country
Relationship among people in group and
individual level
Sentiment and emotional aspect of the
people
Language
And redefine the elements of hierarchy of
needs to meet the country’s environment.
In most of the cases we follow reactive
attitude in addressing a problem. And sometimes it is also different to
perceive the problem well before it occurs, hence human resource manager has to
follow a flexible procedure continuously identifying and developing the system
to upkeep the organizational tempo. Very recently, a lot of Western investors
invested in Asian countries and some of them are facing problems in keeping up
the organizational tempo and balancing cultural gap and meeting the needs of
both local employees and headquarter.
To become successful in any organization
communication process is also very important. The process does not consider
only the verbal aspect of the communication; it covers the tone of the
communication also, which depress the local language of the organization as a
whole. All human relations depend on the ability of the human resource manager
how he/she communicates while being seen or being behind the veil. Sometimes
language barrier and hesitation of people and lack of competence in expression
creates a lot of problem. Hence a clear collaborative and caring culture is
necessary to any international ventures to be successful.
As competition among companies grew
companies became more concerned about loyalty of the stakeholders. This loyalty
gets translated in terms of protection of patents, technology etc. Employees
are the users of information and different facilities of the company and human
resource manager has to ensure a culture of self-reliance and a feeling as if
the company is her/his family. Thus this issue also the important aspect of
human resource management in multinational joint ventures.
The most important dimension of human
resource management is managing cultural differences. When an organizational
entity enters into a new country, it gets exposed to a new culture, new setup,
new people etc. The human resource manager must balance the things, has to be
the charge agent while considering the following things:
Cosmopolitanism
Intellectual communication
Cultural sensitivity
Effective intercultural performance
Concept of cultural management
Concept of changing international business
Cultural synergy
Work culture
These, combined with intellectuality, make
the manager truly global.
Each of individuals is faced with the
problem of integration into unfamiliar culture. They must learn the accepted
cultural behavior in a unique organizational environment that will ensure their
entry, acceptance, and effectiveness in that setting. Whether one is a recruit
in the organization, transferred within the company domestically or
internationally, or an employee of a subsidiary owned by a larger entity, each
must learn to cope with a unique subculture.
Culture gives people a sense of who they
are, of belonging, of how they should behave, and of what they should be doing.
Culture has a great effect on HRM. If managers are to be effective leaders,
they need not only to understand the influence of culture upon organization,
but also utilize that culture to improve performance and productivity.
Organization creates culture. The organizational culture is a set of coping
skills, adaptive strategies used by members in and out of the system. The organization’s
culture has a powerful impact on the worker’s or member’s morale and
productivity. It even influences the organization’s image of itself which, in
turn, is communicated to its public. The different cultures of managers in
Joint ventures represented by differences in languages, interactions,
perceptions and mentalities leads to problems in communication, working
together, problems solving and team sense. The tendency of people within a
certain culture to perceive the others as belonging to a single class or
category is different to that in the other cultures, which is called
stereotype. Stereotypes can affect the actions, coordinations, and corporation
of people from different cultures. Values within a culture are the basic
convictions that people have regarding what is right or wrong, good or bad,
important or unimportant. They help direct the person’s behavior. And
differences in cultural values often result in varying management practices.
Different cultures will affect differently
the thinking and doing of people, therefore, they could be the source of
conflicts in HRM operation of joint ventures, between managers having different
cultural backgrounds.
The figure in the next page illustrates
many aspects of organizational culture. There are aspects of an organization’s
culture that are formal, explicit, and overt, just as there are dimensions that
are informal, implicit and covert. In attempting to achieve its goals and
missions, the organizational culture is further influenced by leadership practices,
norms and standards, rules and regulations, attitudes and principles, ethics
and values, polices and practices, structures and technologies, products and
services, roles and relationships.
In summary, the following factors affect
Human Resource management in international joint venture:
Organization structure
Communication process and language
Responsibility and authority structure
Employee participation and loyalty of the
employees
Job design
Compensation and reward system
Training and development
Fair competition among employee and
Organizational culture
Level of team maturity
Flexibility and strictness
Cultural differences
So for human resource manager the following
steps are very important and these has to be fulfilled to ensure smooth and
efficient operation of the joint venture
Establish people’s participate
Give emphasis more on employees’ interest
and their welfare
Give emphasis on career development
Understand more about the joint venture and
its operation
Align benefits and reward system in the
line with country’s or well as company’s interest
Development of good training system
Establish harmonious relationships with
labor union
Build relationship with regulators
By undertaking these activity at the JV
level;, the HR manager would be able to create a suitable and sustainable
environment for the company to be successful while satisfy the needs all the
stakeholders and establishing fit with its external and internal environment.
Список литературы
Amacom – “Managing HR in small and mid
sized companies” – American management Association – New York 1987
Hamis Philip R. – Moran Robert T. –
“Managing cultural differences” – Gulf publishing company Houston – Texas,1991
Hirsch Georges, Swierzcek Fredric W.
“Multicultural perspectives on European and Asian Management” – EAP 20th
Anniversary.
Jenks V.O – “ Human relations in
organization” – Harper and Row, New York.
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