VOCABULARY
multinational company
have to be aware of
sensitivity , ,
aggressive ,
to achieve status ,
promotion by seniority -
to negotiate
to get to know the person ...
to appreciate
assertive ,
to sign a deal ,
pay-for-performance
to resist ,
subsidiary ,
deliberately ,
so as not to reveal their inadequacies
unthinkable humiliation
to resign
unfair , ,
Managing a multinational company would be much simpler if it needed only one set of corporate objectives, goals, policies, practices, products and services. But local differences often make this impossible. Companies that want to be successful in foreign markets have to be aware of the local cultural characteristics that affect the way business is done.
On the one hand in the countries of North America and north-west Europe management is largely based on analysis, rationality, logic and systems, and, on the other, in the Latin cultures of southern Europe and South America personal relations, intuition, emotion and sensitivity are of much greater importance.
The largely Protestant cultures on both sides of the North Atlantic (Canada, the USA, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia) are individualist. In such cultures, status has to be achieved. You don't automatically respect people just because they've been in a company for 30 years. A young, dynamic, aggressive manager can quickly rise in the hierarchy. In most Latin and Asian cultures, on the contrary, only those bosses automatically achieve status, who is more likely to be in his fifties or sixties than in his thirties. This is particularly true in Japan, where companies traditionally have a policy of promotion by seniority. A 50-year-old Japanese, Greek, Italian, or Chilean manager, would quite simply be offended by having to negotiate with an aggressive, well-educated, but inexperienced American or German 20 years his junior. A Japanese manager would also want to get to know the person with whom he was negotiating, and would not appreciate an assertive American who wanted to sign a deal immediately and take the next plane home.
In northern cultures, the principle of pay-for-performance often successfully motivates sales people. The more you sell, the more you get paid. But this principle might well be resisted in more collectivist cultures, and in countries where rewards and promotion come with age and experience. For example a sales representative in an Italian subsidiary of a US multinational company was given a huge bonus, but his sales which had been high for years declined during the following three months. It was later discovered that he was deliberately trying not to sell more than any of his colleagues, so as not to reveal their inadequacies. He also didnt want to earn more than his boss, which he thought would be an unthinkable humiliation that would make the boss resign immediately.
Also Singaporean and Indonesian managers say that pay-for-performance causes salesmen to pressure customers into buying products they didnt really need, which was not only bad for long term business relations, but quite simply unfair and ethically wrong.
