Riordan Benchmarking Research for MMPBL560

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Riordan Benchmarking Research

In today's globally competitive business environment it is imperative that leaders utilize every resource at their disposal to give their companies the edge they need to succeed. Understanding and incorporating behaviors, attitudes and policies that foster productive work in cross-cultural situations into an organization's culture is an invaluable resource that will play an increasingly more important role in the success of multinational corporations. Successful cross-cultural initiatives are the ones that incorporate cultural knowledge into specific organizational strategies that embrace diversity. Likewise best practices in cross-cultural initiatives are those that make organizations run smoother and foster better overall outcomes in efficiency and profitability.

One of the best ways for companies to determine best practices cross-cultural initiatives is to perform generic benchmarking studies using the practical experiences of other companies. Benchmarking can help an organization determine if its ideas can be truly effective because it will enable the company to see what has and has not worked for other companies and how culturally diverse employees have responded to cross-cultural initiatives that other companies have implemented.

This research paper examines global companies that have attempted to implement cross-cultural initiatives and how they have used cultural synergy strategies and other methods to manage conflict in their global organizations as well as assessing their readiness to adopt and develop cross cultural initiatives.

Benchmarking Analysis

Cultural Synergy Strategies

As globalization of business progresses more organizations outsource part or all of their production offshore in order to stay competitive. Many such functions are being shifted to foreign countries because of low labor costs, the availability of highly educated workers and the stabilization of technology.

In situations like this it is common for international managers to fall into either or both of two practices called parochialism, which is the inclination to see the world only from one's own perspective; and simplification which is the practice of showing the same orientation toward different cultural groups. This often happens to international managers from the United States, who coming from an advanced economy, tend to believe that their high-tech modern knowledge can easily handle the challenges of doing business in host countries with less developed economies (Hodgetts, Luthans, & Doh, 2006). For such managers cross cultural training can really help to expand their capacity to handle the challenges of working with other cultures and allow their organizations to compete more successfully in international labor markets by meeting a higher standard of selection, training, and motivating people (Zakaria, 2000). Such was the case for a company called Foseco.

Foseco held workshops for each of its five peer groups within the company in response to problems that British expatriate managers and employees had experienced in dealing with their Japanese counterparts. These problems were about different approaches to time, meaning punctuality, keeping appointments and schedules; and organizational issues especially concerning different business practices, for example how to organize and conduct meetings, as well as open, unstructured discussions and problems in obtaining feedback. All of these issues were also further complicated by linguistic barriers which caused frequent misunderstandings (Hurn, & Jenkins, 2000).

While the Riordan scenario alludes to only one of these problems occurring, and that is the approach to time as evidenced by missed deliveries, differing cultural dimensions are almost certain to cause all the rest of these problems for the company's new multinational workforce shortly. Building cohesive teams that respect and trust each other can stave off these issues for Riordan before they become serious problems that affect morale and productivity. It would be wise for Riordan to hire outside consultants like Hurn and Jenkins, as Foseco did, to conduct these workshops and help build synergistic cross-cultural teams who can then "evangelize" the cultural synergy concept and spread it to ...