Why American Managers Might Have Trouble in Cross-Cultural Negotiations

I found this interesting while reading some materials ...

"Italians, Germans, and French don’t soften up executives with praise before they criticize. Americans do, and to many Europeans this seems manipulative. Israelis, accustomed to fast-paced meetings, have no patience for American small talk.

British executives often complain that their U.S. counterparts chatter too much. Indian executives are used to interrupting one another. When Americans listen without asking for clarification or posing questions, Indians can feel the Americans aren’t paying attention.

Americans often mix their business and personal lives. They think nothing, for instance, about asking a colleague a question like, “How was your weekend?” In many cultures such a question is seen as intrusive because business and private lives are totally compartmentalized."

Source: Adapted from L. Khosla, “You Say Tomato,” Forbes, May 21, 2001, p. 36.

IT Service management outsourcing

Today I was asked by a friend to recommend him a few companies that could offer support and assistance to them in order deploy new stuff from hardware servers (SUN and HP servers with Linux, Solaris10 and Windows) to software (CRM, VMware, Exchange, SQL, Banking Software, Oracle, SharePoint, …) and the phone system.

The IT service management outsourcing requires strong contract management and risk management and as I somehow had a feeling about their start-up financial institute and the regional IT habits, did come up with such response to him:

Due to the diversity in your required areas and systems, I believe achievement of a quality IT service management can not be done by full outsourcing.

I do know several companies that are focused on a certain products and do have competencies in those areas only and do not provide any other services. For example, a company focused on CRM (MS Dynamics) does provide only that product along with maybe sharepoint.

(Playing a role in all areas of today's IT industry will result into nothing but failure)

In terms of hardware, there are companies specializing in a set of products who do keep a stock in a warehouse and have proper delivery mechanisms. You procuring directly from distributors will reduce the hardware cost at least 20 - 30 % .

Hardware vendors such as SUN, HP or CISCO do provide technical support to their customers under variety of service levels.

My recommendation to you is to take care of your IT in-house and not outsource it. At the most you will need three or four resources that managing them will cost less rather than the risks involved with external companies where you don't have much control except a contract.

Business Motivation Model - Service Oreinted

This post summarizes my understanding of Reward Systems from an Individual and Team perspective and initiates the topic of Service Oriented Reward Systems for Service Oriented Enterprises.

Reward Systems are actually business rules and policies strategically defined by chief directors and maintained by managers within an organization with aim of creating attraction for individuals to join a team and keep them motivated while achieving team goals.

Business Motivation Model
In order to describe a reward system from different angles, we should take a look into business motivation model, emphasize its importance and cascading impacts it could initiate to human resource reward systems.

• Ends (Vision, Goal, Objective)
• Means (Mission, Strategy, Tactic)
• Guidance: Policies & Rules
• Influencer (Internal, External)
• Assessment (SWOT)
• Impact Value (Risk, Reward)

By looking at the above business motivation model we can easily see many similarities to what has been studied about reward systems. Yes! it is true that organizations do behave like humans or vice versa.

Let's serialize the above diagram in a paragraph for business itself and then for an individual.

Organization Units having a Vision will define a Strategy to achieve Goals by different Objectives according to Mission and under supervision based on Policies & Rules execute Processes with different Tactics while it continuously assesses Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats for Internal and External influencers to rectify Risks and create Reward.

It is obvious if an organization unit fails in reward creation it becomes “unmotivated organization” and its subordinates such as directors, managers, employees, customers and partners will not remain motivated under any circumstance unless the issue is resolved.

The same pattern can be applied and studied for individuals within an organization. Let's now modify the business motivation model into staff motivation model.

An Employee joins a firm based on Organization Vision matching to his/her Career Path and to participate in Goals achievement under defined Policies & Rules for execution of Processes where he/she can improve Strengths, eliminate Weaknesses, challenge Threats & benefit from Opportunities while Internal & External influencers impact his/her Risks to achieve Reward.

If any of the above highlighted keywords in the paragraph looses attention or is ignored, the result would be nothing rather than a motivating factor. Most probably negative.

Conclusion
In today's challenging markets and business scenarios it is important to implement a sustainable reward system based on performance metrics that easily adapts into organization based on honesty, integrity and commitment of employees and organization.

On the other hand the concept of Personalization comes into picture, where rewards for each and every particle within a healthy reward system should be personalized based on individual's past performance, needs, socio-cultural and individual characteristics.

At the end, I would like to suggest a model based on the above as a “service oriented reward system” where each and every individual becomes a service provider and each measurable task becomes a micro-service performing an overall service with tangible and intangible rewards that can be orchestrated with organization rules & policies.

Why Rewards?

While studying today, I remember one one my previous readings from a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.

The book is about civilizations. An explanation of possible reasons of why some societies did grow faster and some didn't.

Quote from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
The prologue to the book opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

There is no clear answer given in the book, but you can answer the question by looking to the environmental force and demand. Where Europeans in order to be Physiological secured had to build strong houses. On the other side of the world where climate was not demanding strong houses, people could survive and live without thinking of building strong houses. The same goes for safety and other needs.

By looking at Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, I can realize how people's needs do format the society and by taking this concept to the organization we do see the same concept again.

Based on the above mentioned pattern, we can link several concepts captured from this unit and the forum posts to each other which they do impact the overall implementation of a successful organization reward system.

We do spend energy without expectation either because of self pleasure (inner-rewards) or as learned from ancestors (habit) like the monkeys did.

When a need is satisfied by our energy then we do expect reward.

Conceptually,
We wash our hands to reward health to ourselves.
We cook to reward food to ourselves.
We work to reward comfort to ourselves and enable growth.

"We do a certain task to satisfy a need and get respective reward out of it. "

Let's look at an organization where the top management is not motivated! Consecutively the administration will not be motivated and we can expect everything to become a mess in that organization.

The reward system is always expected from the top to down (management to employee) and (father to kid).
This shows the importance of a high pay to CEO's in organizations and it also answers the overall economic growth in countries like US where special attention is paid to management.

By taking a look at the equity theory and the continuous change of needs within an organization and external factors that impact equity, I do see a strong necessity for an "adaptive rewards system" based on a tailored framework for organizations where industry, organization size and regional culture along with current status are the main modifiers.

A reward system should spirally grow and mainly requires strong leadership skills.

Organizational Reward Systems

By reading the "ORGANIZATIONAL REWARD SYSTEMS" article we realize that we have faced the concepts in action or maybe implemented a few of them during our career paths.

We usually forget how we were motivated in early years of our work and by looking back we see different techniques and methodologies that had their own characteristics and respective impact.

By looking what my previous organizations did and faced; I believe, the best reward systems can not do magic by their own and they require micro attention and control. In general, to have a good understanding of a reward system we have to look at a broader range of activities rather than financial benefits.

For example: a team manager markets (exposes) his/her team achievements loudly within organization. Team members leave jealousy behaviours of theirs and focus on increasing team achievement. Most of the time small actions (like listening with care, taking into consideration, direct support) go inside reward system.

But in reality as soon as we talk about reward the first thing is "raise", or "bonus" which in my point of view is not the best option all times. And by knowing that measurement and constant evaluation based on analysed metrics are the main factors that enable managers to have justifiable judgement over performance, we do see in business somehow that decisions are not made based on them.

I had two questions in that regard as following which were answered by some of my classmates.

1. How can we keep a reward system healthy and mutually profitable for employee and organization?

Nicola Said: With both constant AND consistent monitoring and readdressing of results. Feedback exchange between employees and organization and if the results are not working for both, open discussion on what could be changed. I note "open" discussion because if employees are not involved and the goalposts are changed you will then have issues through changed 'Expectancy' (ie: Effort ->Performance->You Changed the Goal/Reward = I didn't get my expected outcome!).

If the organization however wishes to focus on only the results of the behaviour and ignore the employee expectations/attitude/feelings, and change the actions moving forward based on the results from those past actions then it will follow the Reinforcement Theory.

Jalal Said: First i think it's for the management to set a healthy and mutually profitable reward system.
Usually they look to the company profit first and than the employee comes which is logic.
I think by communication with upper management we can offer them our creative ideas.


2. What are the pros and cons of publicizing employee performance and rewards?

Nicola Said: The pro's could be through following employee recognition but as the assignment materials indicate this could result in employee cynicism. I also believe through too much publicising/hero pedastooling of employees you can end up unwittingly managing with a "divide and conquer" mentality. Publicising the actual rewards or rewards scheme might be a good idea as this can reinforce more publicly to the whole organization your intention as a company, show deliverability of the reward etc.


~Sina Ghazi

Advanced IT & Business Management

I have started this blog to share what I learn from my professors and classmates at University of Wales - Robert Kennedy College.

I am extremely happy that after eleven years of working experience it became possible to spend some quality time for academic studies.

At the moment I am enrolled in the MSc Advanced Information Technology and Business Management programme at Robert Kennedy College, Zürich.

This Publishing will be focused on following topics.

- Organizational Behaviour
- Marketing Management
- Financial Management
- Entrepreneurship
- Applied Leadership
- Management of Technological Change
- Microeconomics of Competitiveness
- Strategic Management

Thanks in advance to all my professors and colleagues.

~Sina Ghazi