International Management Process

Department of Management, Marketing and Information Systems

Multinational Corporate Management

Fall 02 Semester

The International Management Process

An Overview

* International Management process - is heavily affected by the culture (as well as other factors) of the country where enterprises pursue their goals and objectives.

* Culture - comprise an entire set of social norms and responses that condition people's behavior, it is acquired and incalculated, a set of rules and behavior, patterns that an individual learns but does not inherit at birth.

Three Ways Culture is Learned:

* Formal learning - formal activities are taught by precept and admonition.

* Informal learning - the principal agent is molded used for imitations.

* Technical learning - it its pure form, is close to be a one way street.

Sources of Cultural Learning:

1. Family

2. Educational institutions

3. Religion (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism)

Impact of Culture of International

I. Planning - Entail defining the organization's mission and establishing goals and objectives and an overall strategy to achieve them. To create and influence its environment to exert some degree of control over its destiny.

* Master of destiny - this viewpoint believe that they can substantially influence the future, that they can control their destiny and that through work they can make things happen.

* Fatalisitic viewpoints - or determinism, in the Middle East cultures and Muslims faith their viewpoint believe that they cannot control their destiny, that God has predetermined their existence and willed what they are to do during their lives.

* Antiplanning - native Americans believe that any attempt to lay out specific and rational plans is either foolish or dangerous or downright evil. The correct approach is to live in them existing system react in terms of one's experience, and not to try to change them by means of some grandiose scheme or mathematical model.

* Never-ending quest for improvement - a belief that change is normal and necessary and that no aspects of an enterprise are above improvement.

II. Organizing - Organizing involves designing an organizational structure that best enable the enterprises to attain its goals and objectives. This includes determining what tasks need to be done, by whom how tasks should be grouped, who is responsible for what, and how authority should be delegated. Independent enterprises - as an instrument of social action is widely accepted in some cultures such as American. Here a corporation is viewed as an entity that has rules and continuous existence, a separate and important social institution that must be protected and developed. In the organizing approach applied in the two cultures American and South American, consider personal relationships more important that the enterprise. The organizing approach applied in the two cultures would be thus different. For example, there is likely to be less delegation of authority in the personal relationships culture than in the independent enterprise culture.

III. Staffing - Means finding, training, and developing the people necessary to accomplish tasks. Personnel selection is based on merit, is a managerial view dominant in some cultures including that of the United States. Managers holding this view select or promote the best qualified people for jobs and keep them as long as their expectations. Staffing functions is also affected by individuals' view of wealth.

I. Coordinating - refers to the function of directly the people in the organization. It includes inspiring, appealing to individual's motivations, communicating and resolving conflicts.

* Wide-sharing - in decision making, believe that personnel in an organization need the responsibility of making decisions for ongoing development, and they give employees the opportunity to grow and to prove their ability decentralizing, decision-making as they grow.

II. Controlling - is the act of evaluating performance it is monitoring the results of the goals and objectives previously established and implemented including measuring individual and organizational performance and taking corrective action when required.

* Objective analysis - managers who practice this belief make decisions based on accurate and relevant information, and they are prompt in reporting accurate data to all levels in the organization. Other cultures do not place much value on factual and rational support for decisions and the reporting of details is unimportant.

* Gere Hofstede, researcher from the Netherlands, developed one