THE GROWING NEED OF CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT AND ETHICS IN BUSINESS

Abstract

The article discusses questions of growing need of cross-cultural management and ethics in business. Globalization and migration are the main causes of growing number of multicultural enterprises. Globalization is affecting the environment in which managers must function. Fast developments of technologies, growing competition, networks of enterprises are consequences of globalization. Multicultural business environment conditions different problems. Different aspects of culture are affected by technological and economic change.
Effective solutions are needed for enterprises. Cross-cultural management and ethics helps to make preventive actions and solve the existing problems. Global managers are concerned with legal and political characteristics of countries, which are derived from their history and culture.
The main task of cross-cultural management and ethics in business is to propose effective and mostly adapted to situations decisions of problems. There are different cross-cultural problems such as standards, practice, laws, ethics, culture, customs, management system, and socioeconomic system. Managers of multicultural enterprises use different techniques useful to their situation. International managers face a variety of decisions every day. Resources must be allocated, employees selected, and the attractiveness of joint venture partners evaluated. All must be done in a highly complex international environment. Work in virtual teams, difference in time zones, understanding and values in different cultures makes difficulties for managers.
Appropriate solutions of cross-cultural problems may be effective knowledge management, effective management of human resources, virtual teams, and bicultural skills. Especially is important effective work with human resources in the enterprises. Positive view to different attitudes and values help prevent problematic situations and possible conflicts. Here helps organizational culture also.
As empirical research results show the most important cross-cultural barriers are believes and stereotypes, verbal language, traditions, values, nonverbal language, social rules, and other. The made research results show that the appropriate and effective solutions may be collective parties, learning foreign languages, cultural instructing, and cultural programmes. In big multinational corporations solutions may be directly connected with internationally oriented cultural instructing, seminars for staff, global managers’ work.
It is very important to remember that large companies and SMEs have very different capabilities of financial and human resources. Solutions may be made in different management levels of the multicultural enterprise. Information technologies connect millions of SMEs, develop foreign markets and compete strong as nether before. Lithuanian enterprises face not so many cross-cultural problems because our country is rather closed and not very mixed by living nations. Migrants select other more developed countries of the EU as their destination countries.