Abstract

The landscape of international business and particularly International Human Resource Management has fundamentally changed with the expansion of augmented mobility of self-initiated expatriates and skilled migrants. Along with this, it has become increasingly imperative to bring in cultural differences and social interactions between workgroups in organizations and coordinate intra-firm progressions in organizations, such as recruiting and retaining workers, to leverage the probable gains from cross-cultural diversity. Diversity management involves the tactical adjustment of workforce heterogeneity to take in and cherish each employee at par on the foundation of their miscellaneous characteristics, so as to leverage organizational multiplicity, enabling enhanced organizational justice and maximized business sequels. Though it is conventional for an organisation’s culture, constructed over time, to give way to slow change, the international setting makes it far more inevitable to understand the complex norms and dynamic nature of diverse cultural groups. This felt the need for greater awareness for accommodating and managing culturally and linguistically diverse workers has impelled global managers to evolve cross-cultural strategies, both in the domestic and international context. This paper provides a multilevel critical assessment of cross-cultural diversity management in trying to understand the culture at the employee, organizational, and national contexts. By examining universal, ethnocentric (culture-specific), and polycentric cross-cultural models, differences between the Western and East Asian cultural norms have been assessed. The insights highlighted in this paper may help to bridge the cultural distance between diverse groups and individuals from different cultures, and pave the basis for successful management and work in diversified cultures. The study underlines that organizations take appropriate diversity management measures to bind and leverage the ability of diverse employees for maximized competitive advantage.

Keywords