Custom «HR and Cultural Factors» Essay Paper Sample

Cultural issues continue to be central in strategic human resource management. Human resource managers continue to find an increasing need to consider cultural issues as they deal with international and organizational aspects of their duties. They find it very important to consider cultural issues such as language, work related values, cultural intelligence among others as they deal with employee issues such as training, team management and deployment.

Strategic human resource management has as its overall intention, a duty to pair human resource with the objectives of the organization. For strategic human resource management, to ignore the aspect of language can mean doom. It can for example mean that the employee being contracted for the organization does not fit into the organizational culture. This is especially the case when the employee hired cannot communicate with the customers because of language barrier. If the customer is not able to communicate with the employee then the human resource will not be paired with the objectives of the organization. The organization may find that customer satisfaction, as an objective is not achieved. It may find that employees are not marketing the company as needed because they are barred from effectively communicating. The human resource are also not achieving if they cannot communicate effectively with each other to coordinate on tasks.

This in mind, strategic human resource management must ensure that hiring of employees pairs them with the language emphasized as an organizational practice. It means that the organization has to understand where each employee comes from in order to help those who may be deficient in language practice, and thus pair them with the communication objectives.

Cultural factors at the organization level go beyond language. They also include the work related values as a factor that each employee brings from his or her culture. In each culture, there are work related beliefs on when to do work, why to do work and with whom it is appropriate to work on which duties. For the organization, these definitions need to be dropped to take on what the human resource has strategically combined as the human resource teams to achieve certain objectives. To have each employee working on the same level through organizational work values means the employee has to be first understood on what he or she bring on from their culture. The work related values which are in synergy with the organization’s objectives such as collaboration maybe encouraged by strategic human resource management. Other values such as independence may be discouraged if the strategic objective is to work as a team to achieve something. The meaning of this is that formation of teams, as a duty of strategic human resource management is not effective if the cultural factor of work related values is not considered.

The increasing globalization has ensured that strategic human resource management must also target the management of human resource beyond the border with the intentions of still achieving the objectives of the organization. Persons sent to work in foreign countries as employees are not only required to understand what is expected of them but also need to be able to live in such countries by understanding the culture of the locals. Even in the mother countries, globalization has ensured that organizations have to sell and trade with people from different cultures. This means that strategic human resource management must focus on training of employees on cross-cultural issues to increase their cultural intelligence before deploying them overseas or having them come into contact with customers from diverse cultures of the world. Cultural intelligence is an important factor today because it can also market the business.

This paper identifies that cultural factors are inseparable from strategic human resource management. According to the paper, as strategic human resource management pairs the human resource with objectives, it must ensure that cultural factors such as language, work related values, and cross-cultural socialization ability, thus cultural intelligence, are all catered for.