Conflict resolution and management across cultures

Résumé du document

A conflict may be defined as a perception of opposing interests. In business, such as in the today's life, conflicts involve scarce resources, goals, procedures etc. No culture is immune from conflict. The only change is the perception of the conflict: in the US business's conflicts the emotional charge is less important than in a Middle- eastern country. Also in a global context, the probability of misunderstanding due to cultural differences is to be taken into account. The multinational firms are highly confronted by such issues. The stake for these firms is to develop the know-how in managing across cultures to get the best for themselves and when conflicts are triggered, things which can't be avoided, having the competencies to resolve them! So what is the stake behind the know-how in managing across cultures for firms? And what about resolving the conflicts in such a context?

Extraits

[...] How does a manager cope with cultural diversity to surmount and even benefit from the variety of national cultures in their team? First and foremost it is obvious to remind the fact that a lot of transnational project groups result from the search for horizontal cooperation or from various cooperation between companies (partnership, joint venture, strategic alliances In cross-cultural projects, one main goal is research & development. Companies may be interested in doing R&D in cross-cultural project because they can burden of expenses, share skills and knowledge. [...]

[...] There is an organization of “project weeks” where everybody comes together at the same place to discuss. Outside these weeks, the information is transmitted via electronic media. Also there are rare phone calls or smaller meetings. CASE Electrical engineering. It involves collaboration between different departments. Greatest difficulty is to make the work required a priority for team members who are very much in demand. CASE Wireless communication. The project is dispatched among several European countries. The central group is in France to coordinate activities. There is a dense communication within the project. [...]

[...] Conclusion As demonstrated managing and resolving conflicts across cultures is an expert job because knowledge is require to lead the negotiations. Nevertheless it is not always a theoretical knowledge since negotiation is also a matter of feeling and experiences. In order to foster a global understanding and raise the probability of experiment in such contexts, governments and universities throughout the world develop exchange programs. This is the best policy because before working together, we should try to know each other before, or at least the cultures of our maybe-partners. [...]

[...] Conflict resolution and management across cultures I. Introduction Conflict may be defined as a perception of opposing interests. In business, such as in the today's life, conflicts involve scarce resources, goals, procedures No culture is immune from conflict. The only change is the perception of the conflict: in the US business's conflicts the emotional charge is less important than in a Middle- eastern country. Also in a global context, the probability of misunderstanding due to cultural differences is to take into account. [...]

[...] In a conflict a few stakes have to be taken into account to manage it. It exists a few ways for resolving a conflict as Pruitt & Carnevale exposed in their article Negotiation in social conflict in 1993. Problem solving behavior: the negotiator is to giving or requesting an information concerning one of the problem in order to involve the other party in the discussion and to generate high joint benefit. Contentious behavior: The negotiator is going to threat the other part with one proposal. [...]