Cultural Awareness Essay

Traditions and the environment affect a company in many ways.

Tradition is not only a different vocabulary, a different tone of pores and skin, or different styles of food. Traditions, and the environment in which you certainly are a part of, impact the running of day to day business operations coming from all companies’ day in and day out. This newspaper will assess how Hermosa Myers, through the article, “The would-be leader, ” (Green, S., 2011) was affected by the huge tradition shock of working for a worldwide conglomerate coming from Seoul, Southern Korea.

We all will go over what gone wrong with Ms. Myers approach to organization, Hofstede’s five dimensions of culture when it comes to the article, and make some recommendations based on the author’s thoughts. Let’s first start by simply discussing how culture and environment affect management within an institution. A culture as well as environment impact the operations of your business mainly because that traditions generates techniques based on it is environment.

To clarify, how a business sets its guidelines is based on ethnic exceptions, like politics, parts of view, what ever is considered the “norm” for that environment. In many civilizations, it is also safe to assume that women you don’t have the same take as a guy in charge. Among the how females are belittled can be ladies in Midsection Eastern countries that are required to wear veils to cover all their faces and walk behind their partners, not together like in Traditional western cultures. Politics plays an enormous part in how a business runs too.

If a region is firm in the idea that guys are the simply way to complete goals and run the us government, then corporations under that government will probably have the same procedure. Many countries still assume that men happen to be superior and don’t quite believe that women should be in the workplace. We have noticed American traditions change to wherever women successfully run businesses. These sexuality based assumptions are not enough to actuality, however , a lot of countries still hold on to individuals beliefs.

Pertaining to Ms. Myers, being successful in the united states, did not convert to being successful in To the south Korea. Though she was an professional, she acquired many obstacles that hindered her via adequately assisting the company in the ways that the girl wanted. Hofstede’s Five Proportions of Culture Dr.

Geert Hofstede created the first four sizes of culture in the 1970’s after studying statistical data from APPLE over the course of many years. In the 1990’s he came up with the fifth aspect after observing specific social differences in Parts of asia and their connections to Confucian philosophy. (www. mindtools. com) The five dimensions happen to be as follows: Power/Distance (PD), Individuality (IDV), Masculinity (MAS), Uncertainty/Avoidance Index (UAI), and Permanent Orientation (LTO). I will simply discuss most of these as they appear more prominent to this case. First, let’s talk about the Power/Distance (PD) dimension as it pertains to Ms. Myers in Southern Korea.

Power/Distance (PD), “refers to the amount of inequality that exists- and is also accepted- among people with minus power. A top PD report indicates that society accepts an unequal distribution of power, and that people figure out “their place” in the program. Low PD means that power is shared and very well dispersed. ” (www. mindtools. com) As one example from the content, Myers goes on to say, “there were quite simply four amounts: VP, director, manager, and worker bee.

You only spoke to people in your level. SK Telecom featured that they were one of the first Korean cultures to rid themselves of a purely hierarchal type of running. Nevertheless , Myers observed that even though said that, they were doing not adopt that to the fullest.

Only putting something on paper does not constitute rehearsing the said task. For the company to obtain abolished the hierarchal sort of leadership, they will have had to instill better practices and let more type from almost all levels of the company. Masculinity (MAS) refers to what sort of society views/values the traditional areas of male vs female functions. This dimension ascertains that men happen to be in the positions of electricity and women should be in the home, or hold significantly less valuable jobs in the workplace.

This example is regarded as a workplace with large MAS. A workplace with low CONTUDO is considered to have male and feminine positions; yet , those positions work carefully together and don’t get in the way of the task environment. This kind of traditional look at was another obstacle in Ms.

Myers’ venture in Korea. The corporation brought her in to repair their issues with cultural progress, but would not utilize her to the best of her capability. She did not recognize that the Eastern culture she was working for, would not allow her to have a for a longer time “leash” like the American/Western firms she got worked intended for in the past.

Uncertainty/Avoidance Index shows how stress of employees affects businesses. High UAI is considered trying to find rules and regulations for all those situations. There is not any “grey” area and everyone is usually to operate the identical.

Low UAI refers to delete word less secret writing and even more personal progress and presentation of the discord or decision. In this article, I would say that SK Telecom had a high UAI however; Ms.  Myers herself was a person working with low UAI.

Her anxiety and exactly how she approached situations has not been in-tune together with the policies and procedures with the company. There were cultural restrictions such as dialect and targets that the girl did not learn how to confront. Even though she was qualified for the position, she really was certainly not prepared well enough to meet the duties and policies of the business based on her experiences. The last dimension that basically applies to the case is Long-term Orientation or LTO. This kind of refers to how a company values a member’s loyalty/seniority inside the company.

Men and very long time employees have more pull in the workplace. I feel as if SK Telecom valued the opinions of these members who had been with the organization for a substantial amount of time. Delivering an outsider in to operate, did not work with how the company operated inside. SK Telecommunications had substantial LTO and again Myers’ internal operation was with low LTO, a promotion of equality, creativeness and individuality. Conclusion From this paper My spouse and i discussed, The Would-Be Leader by Green.

We mentioned how the ethnic differences influenced Ms. Myers and how several South Korea is when compared to Western traditions. We as well covered the four of 5 Hofstede’s Ethnic Dimensions that applied to this article. We discussed Power/Distance, Masculinity, Uncertainty/Avoidance Index, and Long Term Orientation, all the factors that played an important part in Myers’ failure being a consultant with SK Telecommunications.

In the future, for individuals who look to job abroad, we have to study as much about the culture as possible. We need to figure out as much as possible about the work environment in which all of us work, whenever we wish to flourish in a foreign government.