Culture Diversity

Cultural is defined as a shared design for living. It is based on the values and practices of society. People absorb culture through early process of socialization and the process carries over to the way in which they perceived themselves and the world. Some people agree that cultural diversity in the workplace develop our country skills and contributes to the growth. But how far these opinion accepted by the society as a whole. Many corporations have recognized that diversity contributes to the bottom line by making it easier to retain good employees, lowering costs by developing skill in-house and developing a reputation that helps attract new employees .

Problem arises when a person begins to argue or believe that only his culture seems right, adopts the right values and represents the right and logical way to behave . Difficulties certainly arise when there is diversity within an organization. Most of us have limited information about other people’s worldview.

Cultural diversity changes the workplace by providing new human resources’ and managerial challenges to employers. This often involved with employees who have different attitudes toward time, status and roles, relationship, responsibility, decision making and technology . To effectively manage diversity, managers and supervisors must be aware of the values, motivations, communication styles, attitudes and needs of their employees.

I will discuss issues which relate to Cultural Diversity in the workplace as below:

• outsourcing and off-shoring,

• corporate culture and

• Cultural relativism, ethnocentrism and stereotyping.

This paper wills emphasis on how it affects the communication and business communication.

Outsourcing involves transfer of the management or day to day implementation of an entire business function to an external service provider. The client organization and the supplier enter into a contractual agreement that defines the transferred services. Under the agreement the supplier acquires the means of production in the form of a transfer of people, assets and other resources from the client. In a nutshell outsourcing is hiring another company to do some of your work. For example, Royal Malaysian Customs (RMC) is in the process to introduce a new taxes system so called Goods and Services Tax (GST). In order to make known to public, RMC planned a campaign known as �Awareness Programmed on GST �. Due to our inexperience and short of manpower, RMC has to outsourcing this job and hired a Public Relation Consultant to do this task and RMC provide all the information to the consultant.

Outsourcing will allows RMC to focus on other issues while having the awareness programme take care of by outside expert. The specialized company that handles the outsourced work is often updated with the details and has world-class capabilities.

Outsourcing affects business communication in many ways. Meeting or Face to face meeting is one of the mode it affect business communication. The process of outsourcing involved meetings to clarify the client requirement and the supplier response. Both of the parties will communicate regularly until at certain stage where an agreement signed by the parties. The meeting might not only involve by one party but also a few outsourcers for the Client to decide on the right supplier. The client will invite a few suppliers for a business negotiation or make a presentation for a proposal. Communication plays an important role where the supplier needs to persuade their client to come to a decision. Outsourcing also extended the knowledge of the company through the new technology that a company couldn’t afford to buy on their own.

But outsourcing could lead to communication problems where it eliminates direct communication between a company and its client. This will prevent a company from building solid relationships with their customers. For example RMC outsources their publicity campaign to the Public Relation Consultant will restrict RMC from dealing directly with the public or prospective tax payer. The taxpayer may also need a direct communication with the RMC personnel in order to obtain more information about the new tax. These often lead to unhappiness on one or both sides. There are also a risk of not being able to control some aspects of the company, as outsourcing may lead to delayed communications and project implementation.

Off-shoring in a nutshell defines as moving some of your work to another country with cheaper labor. The two ideas often overlap вЂ" for example, when outsourcing work to a supplier located offshore- but they aren’t the same. A company moving an internal business from one country to another would be off-shoring not outsourcing. Production off-shoring of established products involves relocation of physical manufacturing processes to a lower-cost destination. Example of production off-shoring includes the manufacture of electronic component i.e Panasonic from Japan to establish in Malaysia.

Production design, research and the development process that leads to new products, are relatively difficult to offshore. This is because research and development to improve products requires a skill that is harder to obtain in regions with cheap labor. For this reason, in many cases only the manufacturing will be offshore by a company.

Communication is a focal point in dealing with off-shoring process. The choice of off-shoring is often made to cultural concerns. This involved the language used by the country. For example Japanese companies are starting to outsource to China, where a large numbers of Japanese speakers can be found particularly in the city of Dalian, which was Japanese occupied Chinese territory for decades. But English is a universal language and even the Korean company like Kia, Hyundai etc. off-shoring to Malaysia. Even though Bahasa Malaysia is a national language but in business communication, Corporate company practice English language for their day to day communication.

The off-shoring may concern with the political relationship between two countries. Some of the discussion or negotiation between two countries involved government of respective countries. In certain circumstances both Head of Government such as President or Prime Minister attended and witnesses the signing agreement or memorandum of understanding (MOU) ceremony.

Besides that Corporate branding also play an important role in off-shoring especially in manufacturing field. For example when Nissan Corporation from Japan established a factory in Malaysia, they have to re-brand the models match with the local