Leadership Accross Cultures Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Leadership Accross Cultures - Essay Example The importance of understanding culture in a workplace drew the attention of Hofstede; he decided to analyze the cultures across the world by means of large and quantitative research (Bing, 2004). Most hospitality and travel companies have realized the significance of international business. Despite this realization still, very few can offer training programs to prevent misunderstandings that occur as a result of intercultural interaction. Customer satisfaction for services offered depends on management and supervision of individual service encounter. Service providers that provide their employees with effective training achieve better results. Organizational culture needs to be managed through effective leadership. For this reason, it is important to properly define organizational culture. It is not an easy task to arrive to a definite description, but some basic questions need to be answered. These include: In a wider sense, culture serves to describe varied groups of people based on the extent to which each group is perceived and how a specific group relates to worldly features, which could be living or nonliving including spiritual divines. Historically, culture is said to develop slowly by slowly as each group creates certain patterns of behaviors and beliefs that tend to help them in a way, to effectively solve their day to day problems. As a community lives together, new behaviors crop up and are associated with certain values and beliefs. Furthermore, this is reinforced by rituals, myths and beliefs. It then forms a formidable culture. Apart from the fact that culture enables people to have a sense of belonging, it further provides a means of distinguishing between different groups with different behaviors (Willcoxson and Millett, 2000). Cultures can be dynamic; any changed circumstance leads to incorporation of new patterns or ideologies. As new systems are introduced into the environment, new patterns of behavior are adopted. When such times