A look at the use of cross-cultural knowledge management in a multi-national corporation.
This paper discusses how multi-national corporations, which operate across international frontiers on a global level, manage their knowledge resources and their multi-cultural employees. It looks at how individuals of different nationalities and cultures must operate as a team with some control of the multi-national corporation?s knowledge database. It shows how knowledge is the greatest of all assets, and how the provision of cross?cultural experiences should always be available with the minimum of hassles. Senior knowledge workers and cross-cultural managers should, by themselves, be an asset to the corporation for their knowledge, but their needs and past service should also be recognized.
“A cross-cultural team may be absolutely necessary and the corporation’s vital interests may depend on the smooth operation of such a team. The metaphors that can be derived from a multi cultural team include military, sports, community, family, and associates. There are different expectations about team roles, scope, membership, and objectives that arise in different cultural contexts and these as well as the success of the project have to be managed. Cross cultural management, therefore, has a human resource management dimension in the sense that cross cultural managers must be trained, acquired and deployed keeping in mind factors which are fair to the managers as well as the corporation.”