Big Food Company Case Study

Organisations face many problems when it comes to Cross-Cultural management. The Big Food Company has had many problems in regards to enhancing its cultural awareness and organisational effectiveness. The purpose of this report is to identify the major problems within the provided case, and to suggest ways in which the organisation can improve on these factors and strive towards organisation effectiveness and success.

LITERATURE REVIEW Business activities are increasingly involving team members from multiple nationalities and cultures. While alliances between culturally diverse firms often make strategic sense, managers frequently underestimate the challenge of combining employees with different attitudes, beliefs, and work values. In addition, to open communication, Harrison et al (1998) reported that interactions between group members led to an increased level of cohesiveness, as people were engaged in conversation and interacted more frequently they began to become more attracted to and invested in each other, finding common interests and developing a deeper level of emotional attachment. Cohesion has arguably been the most important outcome within small groups (Carron and Brawley, 2000). Thomas et al. (1994) found that teams composed of culturally diverse members

In effect that meant that the organisation had a large number of people in managerial roles, a union for the employees and links with the Chinese Communist Party. Recently, The Big Food Company has made a decision to take over the entire administration of the organisation, which they called ‘Standardization’. This change was clearly made in the hope that it would create a stronger knowledge transfer and improved networking between and within the cultures leading to ‘global connectivity’ (Barham & Heimer, 1998). This was not the