Case Scenario

Human resource management is the key element of an organization which assesses all the managerial activities related to the human resource of the organization. All issues related to the human resources of the organization are assessed by HRM and then the use of strategic planning is made for overcoming such issues. When an employee is recruited in the company it is HRM’s responsibility to assess all the issues that he or she might face as per his or her designation in the organization (Stone, and Deadrick, 2015). In order to analyze different issues and their impact on new employees in the organization, HRM uses different theories and tools of Human Resource Management.

In this report, different issues related to employee relation and HRM that a manager may face in a banking organization are discussed. Furthermore, their impact on the newly appointed managers in this context is discussed for evaluating the consequences of these issues as well as their impact on the organization.

In this case, this organization is operating in the banking sector. Recently this organization has recruited a senior manager who has worked in a major bank of the United Kingdom. In this case, now he has to shift to the home country i.e. Australia. For this recruitment, being an HR manager, I have to assess all the issues related to employee relations and another issue of the managerial role that may impact the employee’s working life in this new environment.

This newly recruited manager has worked in the same industry that will be a beneficial aspect for him to maintain good relation with his employees. In the banking sector, whole work is interrelated. Being a manager, it is essential for him to maintain good relation with employees working under his supervision. These employee relations will encourage the employee to work efficiently that will ultimately enhance the performance of the organization as well as his individual productivity or performance (Gelfand, Aycan, Erez, and Leung, 2017). Such improved performance will provide incentives to the employees. These employee relations established by the manager will impact the working life of the employees in a positive way by making him comfortable in a new organization (Arshad, 2016). The use of Warwick model will ensure the identification of environmental influences on human resource management. It will further assist the manager in exploring the manner in which human resource management adapts to changes in the context. When this model will be adopted by the manager in the organization by way of achieving an alignment between internal and external contexts will be able to achieve growth and performance.  

In the given case, manager is shifted from his previous working lifestyle in the United Kingdom to the new working environment. In this case, when human resource management has to assess the issues, the manager may face difficulties due to this shifting into a new work environment of a different country. When people migrate from one nation to another, the biggest challenge that they may face are the issues of cross-cultural differences. These differences may be of different kind for example, language issues, the difference in policies and practices, difficulties in integrating with new people, new resentments of the country in multinational organizations, and cultural domination in work life as well (O’Reilly, and Benson, 2016). These issues in the form of challenges are faced by the managers and are categorized in three categories namely corporate company culture, professional industry culture, and national ethnic culture.

Employee Relation Issues

In this category, HRM issues like company history, the experience of the organization, leadership style of an organization, development and business diversity stage of the organization and ownership of the organization are to be counted for the detailed analysis. Such corporate change for the manager will lead to a lack of understanding about the organization policies and practices (Stahl, and Tung, 2015). These corporate cultural issues are most influencing issues for the manager’s working life. Corporate life of managers completely depends on the corporate culture in which they are working, therefore, such changes will affect their life and most of the time, and these changes result in decreased productivity of managers at their workplace.

These cultural differences are mainly comprised of two elements i.e. functional oriented and industry norms. In functional oriented cultural differences, all the industry culture or behavioral issues are considered such as industry growth, industry segment, and its trends in the global market. On the other hand, industry norms are policies and practices that vary from industry to industry. And these policies and norms also vary within the industry (Vaiman, and Brewster, 2015). Professional industry culture prepares managers to work in a particular industry environment in which they are working in order to reach the level of excellence.

These are the typical cultural issues that managers may face while switching to a different cultural life. This includes the cultural elements that make two nations different in terms of cultures such as education, country history, religion, social organization, and philosophy (Xing, Liu, Tarba, and Cooper, 2016). In these terms, an organization’s behavior changes completely for managers so that they need to understand the new cultural behavior and its ethnic element to make their working life smooth in the new working environment (Kosmützky, and Putty, 2016).

All these major differences in cross-cultural working life could be categorized into two dimensions. Cultural dimensions that could dominate the value system of human behavior can be seen through a set of other cultural dimensions. Such value systems affect the thinking power, feelings, actions, and an overall behavior of human beings. These value systems and cultural dimensions can be grouped into different categories like,

• Relation with new people
• Attitude towards cross-cultural change
• Motivation oriented dimensions

In this case, the managers had worked at the managerial post in a major bank of UK and now he has to work at the same designation but in a different cultural environment. These changes will be mostly similar to the above mentioned cultural differences that are explained in different cultural dimensions (Spector, Liu, and Sanchez, 2015). These cultural differences will make the manager’s work life more challenging in establishing good relations with their employees.

Such efficient management of work life for employees can be provided by the organization through employee assistant programmes (Flatten, Adams, and Brettel, 2015). Managers can also manage their work life at their own through working on some key management points, for example, improving knowledge of foreign culture, respecting the new culture, taking helpful decisions to get the trust of employees, try to ignore the cultural difference as much as possible, and managing the differences in a strategic and effective way (Tarhini, Hone, and Liu, 2015). The contingency theory will allow the manager to take the decisions in accordance with the given situation rather than making the use of “one size fits all” method. The important aspects of the changed current situation will be taken into consideration by the manager with the help of this theory. 

Human Resource Issues

The Royal Commission invites the people or organisations to conduct public submission by the online form. This is required by those, who want more help by the email or telephone. The object of submission was to recognise reasons of unproven misconduct, factors that led to occurrence of misconduct and actions to be taken to solve the matters. In this way, Royal Commission conducts an inquiry in the relevant method. After the inquiry, it makes a report on the misconduct in banking and financial industry. The Royal Commission has rights to induce witness and recommend the charges related to crime. The enquiry of Royal Commission significantly affects the employment of managers in bank.

Employee relations are very important for managers in the banking sector, therefore to maintain healthy relations with their employee managers will need some HRM assistant along with their maximum efforts to mitigate other cross-cultural issues that may affect their work life relations with their employees. For HRM, assistant organization can plan for some Employee Assistant Programmes. Through these programmes, management of the organization will provide some assistance to new people in the organization in understanding the cultural differences and provide different ways to overcome these issues (Farndale, and Sanders, 2017). With these programmes, management can help the newly migrated managers from different cultures to help them in establishing healthy relations with their employeesThe manager should consider the Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory with regard to Australia. It will offer knowledge to the manager regarding six aspects namely power distance, masculinity, individualism, indulgence, uncertainty avoidance and long- term orientation. The score of Australia in power distance is 36 which show the reliance of managers on individual employees and teams for attaining excellence. Australia scores 90 in individualism which further provides that Australia is a highly individualistic country where the employees are expected to display initiative and be self- reliant. Australia is a masculine society with 61 as a score where the main goal is to achieve success and to resolve the conflicts at the individual level. Moreover, the score of Australia in the context of uncertainty avoidance is intermediate i.e. 51.  As far as the long term orientation is concerned, the score is 21 as Australia has a normative culture. The people in Australia give prime importance to their traditions and focus on the achievement of quick results. High score of 71 is achieved by Australia in indulgence which will provides the manager with the information that a positive attitude is possessed by the employees and they have a tendency towards optimism.       

Figure 1 Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions in Australia

Managers migrated from different cultures are required to manage their work life according to the new work environment. In the given case the new manager is from the UK appointed to work in Australia. This requires him to adopt the new cultural environment to establish healthy relations with employees. For the same, an organization can help them through EAP but they need to work on their own work-life attributes and professional skills required in the new culture.

Managerial Issues in Work Life

Marinating healthy relation with employees at the workplace also needs an effective communication that can vary from culture to culture. In different cultures, the communication channel and style varies according to their cultural behavior and responses. For a new manager who is migrated from the UK to Australia may face issues in communicating with his employees at the workplace. These aspects of cultural difference in communication may affect the communication style in different cultures. In order to maintain a better work life and healthy employee relations, these managers need to understand the intercultural sensibilities of the employee. Such issues can affect the work life this manager a lot (Sarala, Junni, Cooper, and Tarba, 2016). The communication model of Shannon and Weaver provides that the proper encoding channels or processes which should be applied by the managers for establishing effective communication. It will also assist the managers in overcoming the barriers to communication by designing and delivering a message that get the proper attention of the employees, relate with the common experiences and provides a way for meeting the personality needs of the receiver. Another communication theory provides that the barriers to effective communication can be overcome by the seven Cs communication namely creditability, context, clarity, content, channels, continuity, and capability.     

This new manager has worked in the same industry but in a different cultural environment, therefore, he has to adopt the cultural environment at the new workplace. Along with this, the manager should increase his knowledge about new culture and adapt to these changes as soon as possible. To help the manager, organization can also use the EAPs as mentioned in the above report. This will help him to understand the cultural differences at the professional level. Along with this, he should spend some time to understand the cultural environment of the organization in this new culture. To maintain a healthy relationship with the employees this manager should work on the communication channel to make it more effective for his understanding and understand the employees’ expectation of him as a manager. He can make a separate communication channel for his branch that can establish an effective communication with his employees.

Conclusion

From the above report, it can be concluded that cultural difference affects work-life of managers a lot. With the globalization, these issues are faced by most of the managers. An organization can enhance its business growth with the help of professional expert from different culture by providing cultural assistance to the managers. These professional experts from different culture are also required to work on their individual skills and cultural attributes to adapt to a new culture. This globalization requires these professional experts to migrate from one culture to another, therefore, they need to enhance their knowledge for different cultural values and ethics to maintain a healthy relationship with an employee at the new workplace.

References

Arshad, R. (2016) Psychological contract violation and turnover intention: do cultural values matter?. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 31(1), pp. 251-264.

Farndale, E., and Sanders, K. (2017) Conceptualizing HRM system strength through a cross-cultural lens. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 28(1), pp. 32-148.

Flatten, T., Adams, D., and Brettel, M. (2015) Fostering absorptive capacity through leadership: A cross-cultural analysis. Journal of World Business, 50(3), pp. 519-534.

Gelfand, M. J., Aycan, Z., Erez, M., and Leung, K. (2017) Cross-cultural industrial organizational psychology and organizational behavior: A hundred-year journey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), p. 514.

Kosmützky, A., and Putty, R. (2016) Transcending borders and traversing boundaries: A systematic review of the literature on transnational, offshore, cross-border, and borderless higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 20(1), pp. 8-33.

O’Reilly, K., and Benson, M. (2016) Lifestyle migration: Escaping to the good life? In Lifestyle Migration pp. 11-24.

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Spector, P. E., Liu, C., and Sanchez, J. I. (2015) Methodological and substantive issues in conducting multinational and cross-cultural research. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 2(1), pp. 101-131.

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Tarhini, A., Hone, K., and Liu, X. (2015). A cross?cultural examination of the impact of social, organisational and individual factors on educational technology acceptance between British and Lebanese university students. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(4), 739-755.

Vaiman, V., and Brewster, C. (2015). How far do cultural differences explain the differences between nations? Implications for HRM. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 26(2), 151-164.

Xing, Y., Liu, Y., Tarba, S. Y., and Cooper, C. L. (2016). Intercultural influences on managing African employees of Chinese firms in Africa: Chinese managers’ HRM practices. International Business Review, 25(1), 28-41.