Stephen Shawler Culture

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Issues – first section: Before continuing onwards, it is important to understand the definition of the term ‘culture’ since understanding about culture and being knowledgeable about cultural differences between countries could be helpful in solving the issues that were faced in the case of Stephen Shawler. Culture is an extremely complex topic since it cannot be defined in a single definition and in general, culture can be termed as “a set of socially constructed meanings that shape the behaviour of people in a particular society” (Francesco & Gold 2005, p. 18). In addition, cultural difference exists in the world because people have different perspectives of viewing traditions, beliefs, norms and different methods of expressing personalities …show more content…
When Shawler arrived to Korea to work at his new position in Essilor, he leveraged on his previous experiences and attempted to implement his old approach of hiring employees based on their qualification such as the ability to speak English in order to accomplish the goals that he had envisioned. However, the approach that Shawler had utilized in the past was different for the Korean market because unlike other countries that Shawler had dealt with, the Korean workplace tend to be more collectivistic and have larger power distance. Majority of collectivistic and hierarchical workplaces, such as South Korea, tends to rely on loyalty as well as long-term commitment to the job and employees are more prone to instructions given from higher ranking people in order to accomplish and work effectively (The Hofstede Centre 2015). Since Shawler is from US which is considered as an individualistic and low power distance society, his strategy was to pay more and hire employees based on their merits and thus assumed that they could take initiative to help the business grow (ibid). Nevertheless, this strategy for other team members and S.J. Lee were unfamiliar because several employees were less initiative as well as that there were workers that worked in the company for more than a decade and they were paid relatively less than the workers that Shawler wanted to hire, therefore …show more content…
Some of the key factors contributing to cultural differences are trust and communication because both of these factors plays a vital role in the management of group members as well as the success of firms’ negotiations, therefore it is important to understand the term ‘communication’. Communication can be defined as “the process of sharing meaning by transmitting messages through media such as words, behaviour or material artifacts” and it can also be classified into verbal communication such as written or spoken words and non-verbal communication such as body language, behaviour and different communication style (Deresky 2006, p. 119). Furthermore, culture can also be perceived as the basis of communication because when cultures differ, communication practices also differ and thus dissimilarities in cultures can cause mistrust and miscommunications (ibid). According to the case study, Shawler is experiencing several miscommunications with his colleagues in the company that led to his team members not trusting him. One main reason behind the cause of miscommunication is language barrier and lack of knowledge for a specific culture. Shawler, who recently moved to Korea, does not have the ability to understand nor speak Korean, therefore he required a translator for communications with his colleagues and he was not always sure what

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