The Multi-National Workforce and the Culture that Employees Bring

A growing trend in the business world is globalization. Companies have joint ventures along with branch business throughout the world. Growing globalization has created a situation in the workplace where employees bring many cultures to the workplace. Countries are not only importing and exporting services and manufactured goods, they are importing and exporting talent. The best and the brightest are crossing national and cultural boundaries creating a situation where employees need training on how to cooperate effectively to maximize business efficiency. This paper is a study on the cultures that employees bring to the workforce. It is close to impossible for employees to be instantly assimilated into a host country and culture. Moreover, employees might not want to be assimilated into the culture of the host country where they are working. Therefore they might maintain hold onto the culture of their country of origin. Companies need to understand their culture and understand what this diversity means to the organization.

Introduction

How does the overall culture of an area affect the culture of the company? The culture of the Middle East is very different than the culture of America which is very different than the Culture of Asia. Not only is the culture different between countries, it is different between state or providence lines. Schein speaks about different races bringing their different cultural differences to the work place. Native American people have a culture that focuses on past situations; African American and Latin American people tend to focus on the present while Anglo-Americans tend to focus on the near future. All of these different situations and different people create a challenge for companies that are trying to unify culture within their organization and to bridge cultures over racial and political boundaries.