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BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES sphere), the world has also recognized another major shift due to the internalization of business. Despite this, as has been noted before, the majority of the tools and methods used by HR professionals still owe their origin to an Anglo-Saxon mindset. Typical of these are the instruments used for recruitment and selection. MBTI and JTI (Myers-Briggs and Jung Type Indicators) are the most frequently used Americanized tools applied in business to assess personality type. Over 8,000 companies use the HAY system for job evaluation worldwide. Originally developed by Colonel Hay for evaluating jobs in the American army, it later became extended into the most popular evaluation instrument for international businesses. And lately we see the enormously popular Balanced Scorecard, devel-oped by Kaplan and Norton, that initially helped many North American firms to measure important perspectives of business beyond the simply financial. But what have these Americanized perspectives done for (and to) non-American organizations? Obviously there was an era when globalization was taken literally. “It works in the US, so let’s export it to the rest of the world,” was the main principle. Generally this approach has failed. In fact, it has only worked in organizations where the corporate culture dominated the local or national cultures (the Hewlett Packard “way” and McKinsey are obvious examples), and also perhaps in organizations where the product was very dom-inant – such as Coca-Cola, Disney and McDonalds. But the majority of US-based organizations faced resistance where a US logic was just too much for the local environments to bear. When an R&D culture believes that one of the three main perspectives of the HAY system (knowledge required to perform) is being given a lower weighting than another perspective (such as accountability), should we just adjust the weightings in order to keep the most tal- 244 MANAGING HR DILEMMAS ACROSS CULTURES ented researchers? Again, when the financial perspective in the US is seen as important compared to the customer perspective in Japan, should we assign a different weighting in the respective cultures to rebalance the scorecard? We have observed counter movements where HR practices were decentralized. Too many local (and legal) differences hindered a single, global approach. It may have worked in a multi-local environment, but when the organization becomes international or transnational, the multi-local approach fails. WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? We offer our thinking based on the logic of reconciliation to explain and discuss how the role of the HR manager in the twenty-first cen-tury is to reconcile major dilemmas caused by cultural differences across national boundaries and organization cultures. Some further examples and complimentary discussion are also given in Did the Pedestrian Die? by Fons. THE ROLE OF HR AND CORPORATE CULTURE In Chapter Four we described the different meanings assigned to organizational relationships. We delineated four major typologies describing different organizational logics or corporate cultures: the Family, the Eiffel Tower, the Guided Missile, and the Incubator. In the period between 1980 and today, we have observed many West-ern (Guided Missile) organizations that have sought to impose Western (or rather Anglo-Saxon) HR systems on organizational cul-tures that were based on entirely different assumptions. The result was either “corporate rain dancing” or complete ineffectiveness of the intended outcome. What do we do with a pay for performance scheme in a Family culture? And what about a formal job evaluation session in an Incubator culture? Or the encouragement of team 245 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES working in a highly individualistic and achievement-oriented cul-ture? Does HR research from US and Anglo-Saxon thinking transfer to other cultures? We will therefore offer reasons why the effectiveness of systems might be jeopardized when crossing cultural boundaries, the dilem-mas that can arise and how they can be reconciled. RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION Recruitment over many years has left many organizations staffed by people comfortable with the old ways of working, or old paradigms. The greater the need for global change, the greater the likelihood that new blood will be required, not simply to replace wastage and retirement, but to bring in new key skills. Selecting the right person for a post is a key decision for HR and various tools and systems have been developed to support the decision-making process. There is considerable pressure on HR to make good decisions in recruit-ment. On the one hand to get the right person, on the other to avoid discrimination. On the one hand so the appointee can do the current job well, on the other hand to grow the job in the future. HR faces a whole series of such dilemmas. Similarly, organizations have to retain their best staff and prevent any brain drain or loss of key skills (and knowledge) to competitors. Do organizations invest in training, only to lose their existing staff with enhanced skills and knowledge to the employment market place? Because attracting and retaining staff is one of the key tasks of HR professionals, it has been developed to include a wide range of methods of selection and related procedures, supported by consul-tants and headhunters. Surprisingly little attention has been given to 246 MANAGING HR DILEMMAS ACROSS CULTURES “Amadeus” Munich-based Amadeus was faced with such a dilemma. As the organization that operates the Airline Seat Reservation manage-ment system (originally for Lufthansa but later for Air France and other major carriers), it had very important key staff trained to a high level in the particular and very specialist IT software technol-ogies to support access to VLFADB (very large and fast access databases) – namely thousands of concurrent online reservation or booking enquiries from any travel agent or check-in desk across the world. To cope with the very high hit rate, special soft-ware and computer languages are required, not the more common Unix or Windows technologies. On the one hand these IT special-ists were highly valued because of their specialist knowledge but on the other they perceived (like all IT specialists) that they were falling behind in their employability because they had no up-to-date transferable competence in IT. Most didn’t even know about the fundamentals of Windows software. So on the one hand they felt secure and valued when working for Amadeus, while on the other hand theirs was the only employee in the world using the particular VLFADB software and thus they had no other place to go. Should they leave and work in the more common Unix or Windows arena – and thereby be more secure in the generic IT market place? Amadeus reconciled their dilemma by training their IT staff in Windows and Unix even though they didn’t need such skills and knowledge for their work with the company. At first sight this might have made the IT personnel immediately leave to exploit their generic knowledge, but in practice they remained even more faithful to Amadeus as the only employer they knew that would keep their skills and knowledge up to date. 247 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES a very much under-researched issue – the image of the organization to the job seeker or potential employee. We all recognize that the old model of employment with a major corporation as a job for life is no longer true, even in Japan. Mining our database generates evidence supporting the proposition that the younger generation – from 20–30 years old – have become more outer directed, more affective (prepared to show their emotions), have a shorter time horizon and want to work more with others in teams. This is not surprising when we realize that they too have rec-ognized that the old model of lifetime employment with one company is dead. These young, generation X, high-potential employees, and the even younger baby-boomers, have a greater self-confidence in their own individual abilities. Their preference has shifted away from the task-oriented Guided Missile to the per-son-oriented Incubator work environment. Their rationale for career security is based on maintaining a set of personal and transferable competencies. It is their “employability” rating, based on their con-temporaneous skills profile, that drives them, not the old notion of corporate security from an employer of long-standing repute or pro-tection by their trade union. What might make a large organization attractive to a young, ambi-tious, and talented employee now? On the demand side, organiza-tions of the old economy find it increasingly difficult to attract good candidates. There is a tension between the image of these companies and the ideals that young, talented people have in their heads. The power-oriented Family culture and the role-oriented hierarchical structures of the Eiffel Tower still dominate in both perception and reality. The big players realize this and are doing their best to respond. The global corporate mindset appears to be bland (“it’s all the same 248 ... - tailieumienphi.vn
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