Australian Business Expansion and Managing Cultural Diversity
Introduction
An Australian-based company is prepared to expand internationally. Although this plan would help the business grow with increased revenue, the company needs to consider many factors during planning. The company should consider the landscape of the chosen country. Aside from legal, social, and political considerations, the company should focus on mapping and understanding the cultural landscape in the chosen country because differences in culture would affect outcomes for the business, particularly the local community’s acceptance of the company’s products and services (Ahlstrom & Bruton, 2009). Culture influences behavior, particularly consumer behavior and decision making, which means that the demand for the company’s products or services would largely depend on the cultural values and traditions in the chosen local community for expansion (Kardes, Cronley& Cline, 2014). To help the company in planning, the succeeding discussion explores the factors pertaining to cultural differences that would affect the company. In addition, the report will include recommendations for the company to efficiently deal with cultural differences. Overall, the main consideration is that as an Australian-based company wanting to expand internationally, the company should consider cultural diversity in planning and arrive at strategies to handle the issues that may arise within the company and in relation to customers due to differences in culture.
Australian Business Expansion and Managing Cultural Diversity
Culture influences the way that companies or organizations handle business. This is because culture affects behavior as well as values and perspectives, which means that culture influences how people behave in the workplace, communicate with one another, handle roles and responsibilities, and view issues or situations that relate to the business. The main issue, however, is that cultures are different, which is a more important consideration in multinational organizations that employ a diverse workforce population. Cultural differences in the organization means that people would have their own beliefs, values, and perspectives, some of which conflict with that of other people (Pride, Hughes, & Kapoor, 2009). For this reason, businesses should be able to adopt cultural diversity management strategies to handle conflicts that may arise due to cultural differences. Without these strategies, there would be ambiguity and conflict in the workplace.
Consequently, ambiguity and conflict would lead to dysfunction, thus, disabling individuals and groups from fulfilling their roles and responsibilities, and affecting the success of the company (Crossman, 2011). For the Australian-based business, cultural challenges would arise due to conflicting cultural values. Research studies describe cultures based on context – high versus low context cultures (Crossman, 2011). In terms of communication, people in high context cultures would pay attention to the context of conversations. On the other hand, people in low context cultures pay more attention to the actual words being said by other people rather than the context of the conversation. Hence, the Australian company, which is from a low context culture, would find communication difficult in high context cultures such as in China, Japan or Korea. While Australians are straightforward in communicating with people, people in low …
