Cross-­Cultural Challenges with Mergers & Acquisitions

Template: Cross-­‐Cultural Challenges with Mergers & Acquisitions

Challenge description	Scene Description	Idea to face the challenge	Academic Reference
The cultural differences related to the way of working and ways of doing some tasks.	In a scene, we can see that the Chinese workers focus on “number” while the US workers focus on “quality”. Furthermore, in several scenes the quality of the glass is not good enough and the goals are not reached. I would like to focus more on how Chinese people want to separate the glass in order to recycle, while US workers think that is stupid.	The goals have to be correctly implemented in order the workers to be aware of them. What do the company needs? Good quality in less products or lots of products with less quality? This has to be clear for the workers and they will get used to it. With the way some tasks are done, managers have to be in a constant feedback activity. They have to understand the employees’ concerns and issues as soon as possible and take action. The company has to engage with all the employees.
Working conditions and behaviors are different among both cultures.	The cultural differences are related to the grade of safety, the trade unions in order to achieve better conditions and the orders or ways of giving the register out. Also, there are differences with the wages, because an USA woman says that her new wage is almost the half from the previous one.	Regarding the safety and trade unions’ differences, although the company should try to explain every worker why the things are that way (safety policies) or what are the reason to do other things (strikes), these are legal issues that have to be understood, in this case, by Chinese workers. Because the company is in the USA, things are this way and the workers have to accept, even if the culture is different. Regarding rituals of giving the register out, at first sight it might be a problem because it is an unusual thing for both types of workers, but once they get used to it, it is not a problem anymore, they have just to be tolerant among them. Regarding the wages, the company should find an average point in order to fulfill both satisfactions (US workers wages desires but also company less wages’ costs).
Fear of the different way of working, even stereotypes that seem to be real.	Americans think the Chinese work too hard and too long (even weekends) and do not take the health and safety regulations seriously. Chinese workers think Americans do not work hard enough, they are “lazy”. They do not understand each other why they cannot work just like them (as hard or as safe, respectively).	Although the party and some activities (fishing and weapons usage) that we see in some scenes can make a great change here, creating a mix-team can be key in this aspect. Working with different people can make a team to be stronger. Furthermore, workers have to learn to work with different people, not only with different temper but also with different general culture, which somehow is more difficult, but final results tend to be awesome if the team has some moderators or rules.