Cultural Awareness (Term Paper Sample)

Question 1: You are the new Manager of a company who has recently been appointed to improve cultural awareness in leadership and management of a large international corporation.  How would you go about this process and what strategies would you introduce?
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Word Count: 3110 words
Introduction
Cultural awareness is described as the nature to which an organisational workforce accepts existing cultural diversity and understands the role and relevance of such culture awareness in management (Dolan & Kawamur, 2015). The increased organisational internationalisation process has resulted in increased organisational workforce diversity. However, the workforce diversity element and the resulting HR management practices have been faced with challenges due to low cultural awareness levels (Schermerhorn, 2011). This essay aims at developing cultural awareness need identification process for management in an organisation facing cultural awareness limitations. Moreover, it develops a description of the potential HR management strategies to promote cultural awareness in multinational organisations and evaluation approaches of the strategies success.
Process of Creating Cultural Awareness
Creating cultural awareness in organisations is a long term process, which should be based on the development of a sustainable strategy to ensure continuity. Thus, the cultural awareness process and strategies formulation can be explained as an organisational change process. An organisational change process is described as the process and approach through which the state and processes in an organisation transit form one from to the other. Therefore, any form of transition of the strategies, approaches, practices, or beliefs is recognised as a change process (Anderson, 2012). Organisational change processes have the potential for facilitating overall organisational success as well as the potential for resulting to organisational failures if not handled properly. Therefore, in order to ensure that a cultural awareness changes process results in increased organisational competitiveness, the organisation can apply change models and frameworks such as the Lewin’s change model. The Lewin's change model argues that an organisational change process can be classified into three main stages, namely the unfreezing, transition, and the refreezing stages respectively (Lewis, 2011).
The first stage is the unfreezing stage. This change management stage involves the development and creation of a change receptive environment. The unfreezing process is mainly involves in the development of organisational policies and operational environment through which the proposed change can take place (Lewis, 2011). In the case of developing a cultural awareness program, the unfreezing process involves the adoption of a continuous improvement organisational strategy. In this context, a continuous improvement strategy application ensures that it develops the relevant development culture and orientation across the organisational resources (Baker, 2011). In this case, the process aims at ensuring the various resources alignment with regular organisational changes, thus reducing the overall potential resistance by the employees and other organisational stakeholders in the event of rolling out a cultural awareness strategy (Dolan & Kawamur, 2015).
The unfreezing stage in the cultural awareness change management process is mainly involved with the evaluation of the organisational strategies. The evaluation should be based on the existing market changes as well as the organisational future desires. In this context, the first step involves the evaluation of the desired cultural awareness results for the organisation in the market (Trompenaars & Nijhoff, 2010). The desired outcomes of a cultural awareness among the management could be to reduce industrial conflicts or/and increase the workforce satisfaction in the long run period among others. The determination of the desired outcomes enables the management and the organisational leaders develop a shared cultural awareness, vision enhancing the channelling of the organisational resources and capabilities into achieving the desired results vision. An example of a vision creation in developing cultural awareness in an organisation can be illustrated through the Lenovo case study.
Once the Lenovo Company acquired the IBM PC division, there arose workforce conflicts and misunderstandings between the Chinese and the western workforce. Thus, the management developed a vision plan of increasing cultural awareness between the Chinese and the Western cultures as a means of reducing the existing workforce conflicts (Salter, 2012). Consequently, this ensured reduced confusion and the development of proper strategies in the organisational workforce management. Once the desired outcomes are determined and a cultural awareness, vision established, the second step would be an organisational systems analysis. This would incorporate a critical analysis on the existing cultural awareness programs in the venture. The evaluation process would demonstrate the existing strength that could support a cultural awareness program, as well as identify any weakness in the current organisational systems such as a diversity resistant culture, which could reduce the possibility of a cultural awareness program success (Trompenaars & Nijhoff, 2010).
Once the evaluation of the organisational goals and systems is executed, the cultural awareness change process transits onto the second stage in the Lewin’s change model that is the transition stage. The transition stage involves the actual change process as well as the management of the change process effects to ensure that the process gains the expected positive effects and organisational benefits, while regulating the process against any unintended negative change effects. This is based on the understanding that a change process in a dynamic process that has no static elements as its execution relies on both the organisational internal and external environments, which are constantly changing (Battilana & Casciaro, 2012). Therefore, it is imperative for the management to safeguard against undesired negative change process effects. In the case of the development of cultural awareness programs and systems, the transition stage involves the execution of cultural awareness programs in the respective organisation. This includes establishment of a communication system as well as the proposed strategy evaluation approaches where the evaluation and performance parameters of success in the cultural awareness process are determined proactively, to serve as a guiding framework for the managers in the cultural awareness improvement strategies execution (Rosemann & Brocke, 2015).
In this regard, once the cultural awareness strategy is communicated to the organisational stakeholders, the management is involved in the evaluation and monitoring of its effects. In this context, the management should proactively develop performance evaluation measurements to evaluate both the direct and indirect cultural awareness development change process impacts. Among the most common performance evaluation strategies that can be applied in evaluating cultural awareness development change process are the benchmarking and the blue ocean strategies. In this regard, the organisation could benchmark its cultural awareness development program achievements and effects against peers in the global industry that have developed the best practices in creating cultural awareness (Burtonshaw-Gunn & Salameh, 2009). On the other hand, the organisation could use the blue ocean strategy through setting culture awareness annual or semi-annual targets and evaluating the extent to which the respective strategies have been achieved any subsequently monitoring any variance in the expected and attained performance, allowing for the development of appropriate proactive measures and strategies (Niciejewska & Dimitrov, 2009).
The final stage in developing cultural awareness programs is the application of the third Lewin’s model stage, the re-freezing stage. This stage involves the establishment of a stable organisational state after the change process (Trompenaars & Nijhoff, 2010). However, the established stable state allows and incorporates the possibility and opportunity for future changes in the organisation. In the case of a cultural awareness development change process, the refreezing stage would include the development of HR policies. In this case, the respective HR and administrative policies would ensure that the attained developments in the cultural awareness development are not reversed in the long run period (O'Donovan et al, 2010). Moreover, they would ensure that the organisation develops a strategic ability and competency through which any future improvements on its management cultural awareness would be based upon.
Strategies for Increasing Organisational management Cultural Awareness
Cultural awareness strategy is one that seeks to increase and elevate the cultural awareness levels in an organisation (Flohr, 2010). This essay section describes the various strategise through which to increase cultural awareness in an organisation, describing how each of the strategies is formulated and how their application increases cultural awareness among organisational managers and leaders in the long run period. Among the described cultural awareness development strategies include diversity training, minority leadership, and HR management policies diversification strategies respectively.
The first strategy is diversity training. Diversity training is the process through which organisational managers and leaders are trained on approaches through which to handle and manage the global market ...