Mangers And Cultures:Indian Perspective

Executive Summary

The aim of this report is to identify the cultural values, qualities and attributes of Indian culture. Firstly culture is defined and some brief idea is given about the Indian culture in general. Then the main focus is on the managerial and organizational behavior and culture in India. Then how Indian culture is affected by the western culture and how different MNCs are creating difference in traditional way of organizational culture is being told. Then a fair comparison is done between organizational culture between Indian and US, Japan and Sweden. Lastly in conclusion some tips and a key to success are given to the manager who is going to establish a business in India about Indian culture.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

WHAT IS CULTURE? 1

SNAP SHORT TO INDIAN CULTURE 3

INDIAN MANAGERIAL CULTURE 4

UNIQUE FACTORS WHICH MAKE DIFFERENCE 6

CONCLUSION 8

REFERENCE: 10

Introduction

Wayne Tosu, the Managing Director of Carlyle Group (2005) says that "If you put one dollar in the US, you may get two dollars in three years. But if you put the same dollar in India, there is a high chance of getting three dollars." (India Brand Equity Foundation).

Further Jack Welch, CEO of GE, says on India's intellectual capital that "India has disappointed me as a market but exceeded my expectation in terms of intellectual capital." These quotes show the potential in Indian market and Indian skilled people. Now many MNCs are coming to invest in India and establishing their business in India. India is going towards globalization and western culture is penetrating into organizational culture of India. But to establish a good and successful business, a manager has to understand the culture of the host county where he is going to bring a new business and mould himself according to the host culture. A manager can be successful only when he can bridge the gap between two different cultures in workplace and develop an environment which can accommodate people from host culture. Corporate culture affects the lives in greater or lesser ways.

What is culture?

In English language, "culture" has a number of other meanings, all deriving from its original Latin meaning 'colere', which could be translated as 'to build', 'to care for', 'to plant' or 'to cultivate'. Thus 'culture' usually referred to something that is derived from, or created by the intervention of humans - 'culture' is cultivated. With this definition in mind, the word 'culture' is often used to describe something refined, especially 'high culture', or describing the concept of selected, valuable and cultivated artifacts of a society. (Dahl, 1998, 2000). At the core culture consist of various assumptions and beliefs about how things are happen and get done. Gradually these assumptions and beliefs are taken as granted and generally forgotten (Schein, 1987, p.9). Very few people in this era aware about their basic culture because they just live their culture in their day to day life and they have not analyzed their culture and can not answer why they do the things they are doing in normal life. (Barnett & Barnett, 2003).

Many people have defined culture in different ways. There are different views and interesting comparison of culture. Sinha (2004) compares culture with air that we breath, we cannot live without it but we cannot see it directly; Hofstede, one of the gurus of culture (1980) says that "Culture could be defined as the interactive aggregate of common characteristics that influences a human group's response to its environment." He concludes that the culture is the programming of the mind which distinguishes one category of people from another. Lederach (1995) defined that "Culture is the shared knowledge and schemes created by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around them". Trompenaars (1993) further says that its like gravity, we cannot experience it until we jump 6 feet into the air. Its like fish in the water, it sustain us, we live and breathe through it. What one culture regard as essential, a certain level of material wealth for example, may not be so vital to other culture (Trompenaars, 1998). Barnett & Barnett (2003) believe that no culture is good or bad its just different. American culture is good within American in USA, Japanese culture is good within Japan among Japanese and Indian culture is suitable and appropriate within India among Indians.

Hofstede (1980) and Earley & Singh (2000) describes that the word culture is usually refer to societies or for ethic or regional group, but it can be applied equally to other human collectivities or categories: an organization, a profession, or a family. The organizational culture is a part of the social culture. In fact it is not entirely depend on the social culture because if it were then under one social culture there would be only one organizational culture but it's not true. The main factor to diverse the organizational culture from the social culture is technology (Earley & Singh, 2000). Again work or management culture is different from the organizational culture; work culture includes set of beliefs and values to do work in the organizational culture. In fact the organizational culture is partly shaped by societal culture and partly by the universally applicable management culture (Earley & Singh, 2000).

Snap short to Indian culture

Talking about the Indian culture, Sinha and Kanungo (1997, p.94) point out that 'studies of Indian culture and behavior often yield inconsistence and contradictory findings.' Indian culture is highly complex and pluralistic containing seemingly inconsistence and contradictory orientations. In a clustering of cultures, India stood alone indicating a unique configuration of its value (Ronen