Page 65 - DMGT548_GLOBAL_HRM

Global HRM

Notes loyalty versus job competence; consultation and involvement versus management authority;
and work group innovation versus specialist know-how. They are concerned about developing
a ‘functional’ model of management in the European context that reflects the different cultural
values and legal institutional practices in Europe. They present European management as:
emerging and being linked to the ideal of European integration, which is continuously
encompassing more and different countries; reflecting key values including pluralism and
tolerance, although not consciously developed from those values; being associated with a balanced
stakeholder philosophy and the concept of social partners.
It is possible to summarise the European context of management and organisations as:

1. There is no national identity across the European Community as there is in Japan and the
USA; for example there is no equivalent of the ‘American Dream’.
2. There is no common language or culture.

3. Change is more complex than in American or Japan, particularly with the further
integration of Eastern and Central European countries, and this is in some ways artificial
in creation: manufactured by the architects and politicians of the Single European Market,
signifying the higher level of creativity needed to manage in this environment.
4. There is increasing cross-border activity through mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures
and direct investment situations requiring approaches to management such as project
management and networking.

5. There is increasing emphasis on the use of technology as a means of competing (such as
e-commerce opportunities and communicating (such as extensive use of Intranet systems).
6. There is continuing demand for linguistic skills, in addition to more traditional
management skills.
7. There is a need to manage increasing diversity (between cultures rather than trying to
create a uniform culture), ambiguity and complexity and an increasing need to create
more flexible organisations and methods of working in order to cope with both diversity
and change.
Within this context the management of people may be rather more complex than in American
models of human resource management and a higher level of flexibility may be required
compared with Japanese approaches.

Notes Implications for Managers: Revisiting DEC (Europe)
European model of People Management state that horizontal linkages and lateral hierarchies
and communication are becoming particularly important in regions such as Europe, where
there is a need to develop flexibility and innovative processes. This is in keeping with the
necessity to facilitate the transfer of information and to share and generate new knowledge
within the concept of the learning organisation. McCalman describes the specific example
of the setting up and operation of a cross-functional and cross-cultural project team tasked
with developing a Europe-wide customer order delivery system that guaranteed delivery
to the customer within 10 days. What was a complex logistic planning process was to be
devised laterally by this management group, which would meet regularly at different
European locations.
In establishing the project team, a major consideration was that the task had to involve a
lot of people across Europe, in order to fully understand the process that required one
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