Doing business across cultures_11

MANAGING HR DILEMMAS ACROSS CULTURES long term, directive–participative and inner and outer locus of con-trol can be reconciled in an integrated culture. A good example is the all-employee stock option plan at Cisco. The organizational leadership stresses that the program alone does not create an ownership culture; it is just a manifestation of it. Cisco’s corporate culture stimulates teams whose individual employees are empowered to make significant decisions, linking short-term actions with long-term strategies. Moreover, employees can’t be motivated by options if they don’t understand them, so the company runs an education program. And there is no cultural environment where that doesn’t work (Figure 7.7). It is striking how many research findings have indicated that money is not a motivator. But Etzioni wrote about this in the nineteenth century when he said that there were three ways of controlling people: by force, by money, and through normative controls and that only the third was a motivator. Money is in fact a “dissatisfier.” Employees quickly get used to the good feeling and jump to the next expectation. 10 10/1 Hiding behind the back of high performers 10/10 The well-informed co-decisive employee who owns the company in the long term 5/5 Preferent stocks, where there are different types of owners 1/10 Short-term gains at the cost of long-term company productivity 0 Figure 7.7 Rewarding individual performance 10 The pound in your pocket 269 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES The process of internationalization forces us to adapt much of the existing logic in management thinking. There are some options that do not work as well. You can choose a reward system stimulating team spirit. People from Japan excel at that, but it often leads to col-lective mediocrity. Even worst is the compromise – rewarding the small team. Both the individualist and the team player feel demotivated. The classic solution is “co-opetition,” meaning cooper-ating in order to compete. Such reward schemes are aimed at having creative individualists molding teams that achieve beyond expecta-tion. THE NECESSARY ROLES OF A SUCCESSFUL TEAM Belbin (1996) described an effective team as a group of people that aim for a shared goal through four phases: forming, storming, norming, and performing. In reality, however, the dynamic of a team is a function of the differences in the contributing team roles of indi-viduals. It is these tensions that flow from the range of resources available to the team to different skills and thinking that have to be reconciled. But even more, the contributions from individual mem-bers are not restricted to their primary team role, but to changes and flexing to other roles as the members of the team influence and inter-act with each other as they try to perform. In the transitions between each of the four phases the differences between the roles become even clearer, and the reconciliation of the different orientations becomes essential. Thus there is the potential for tension between any two primary roles. When these manifest as dilemmas and are not reconciled, the team remains in the storming phase. When the dilemmas are recon-ciled, the team can move to the higher levels of the “performing” mode. 270 MANAGING HR DILEMMAS ACROSS CULTURES Dilemmas are necessarily played out between people and it is the job of the HR professional to provide an environment in the organi-zation in which such dilemmas can be reconciled. At the meta-level, the overall task for HR is to reconcile the tension between the organi-zational perspective and the individual perspective of each employee. 271 CHAPTER 8 Finance and accounting across cultures ... - tailieumienphi.vn