Understanding cross-cultural relations in an international company: Galderama

Extract

[...] Expatriates generally do not have any special intercultural training and must learn to manage cultural differences within their teams little by little. The intervention of a cultural mediator. It helps to make the meeting fruitful and constructive, rather than leading to the polarization of the cultural groups involved. Thus, this approach consists in supporting an intercultural team in the development of acceptable ways of doing things for its members. After the team has started working together, a first meeting leads each participant to identify the incidents that he considers critical to the team's operation or that cause him to be misunderstood. [...]

[...] Perception of French and British managers on each other The French managers have kind of a negative impression about the effectiveness of the British managers. They view them as they lack effectiveness to carry on the policies, although they may be effective to help to determine them. They think that they are kind and friendly but not a hard-working manager as they stop working to early compared to the French managers. The British managers, had problems to deal with women with a similar or a higher position in the hierarchy. [...]

[...] The expectation on the French side is therefore that the channel of communication be carefully prepared. If not, the imperative nature of the request is all the stronger. One particular feature of the Germans that received some attention in the interviews was their careful approach to business, careful both in the sense of being very precise and accurate, as well as in the sense of being conservative, reluctant to take risks? One interviewee gave a concrete example of this behaviour in relation to sales forecasts of the German subsidiary for one particular product. [...]

[...] Among its European subsidiaries are those in France, Germany and the UK. The management of the holding company is staffed by several nationalities, as is the laboratory. In the light of continuing European integration - economic and otherwise - an investigation was undertaken to gain insight into how the three dominant members of the present-day European Union - the German, French and British - cope with each other's cultural differences when working together. INTERVIEW METHOD Interviews were carried out by researchers, who each represented one of the three cultures under investigation. [...]

[...] Another talked of a lack of courage in seeing matters through. He talked of a lack of rigueur - the British being `wishy-washy either because they did not know what they really wanted, or because they were afraid to commit themselves to an action or decision that might later rebound to them. Another interviewee went further by saying that the British were known to have gone back on decisions they made or supported earlier. This view was contested by another informant who maintained that if the Brits made a `gentlemen's agreement they always stuck to it. [...]