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This article focuses on the challenges a multinational enterprise (MNE) faces in implementing an important management practice -- performance feedback -- across its different business units and cross-cultural teams. Two critical incidents are presented that involve miscommuniation between managers working on a virtual project in the United States and Malaysia. Special attention is devoted to describing how an MNE can use an organizational learning process to diagnose and develop solutions to cross-cultural conflicts. Specific suggestions are outlined for resolving the incidents, and organizational learning steps are presented to extend this knowledge throughout the MNE, resulting in organizational competitive advantage.
Multinational enterprises are increasingly using cross-cultural virtual teams and project task forces to increase speed in launching products to market and in bringing together employees from different locations, functional areas, and cultural perspectives. While such virtual processes offer many advantages to MNEs, they also involve many challenges (Cunha & Cunha, 2001), and require the deeper application of many traditional management practices (Cascio, 2000). Unfortunately, the potential of such virtual teams is often not realized, in large part because of the difficulties inherent in these cross-cultural encounters.
In this article we focus on the challenges that an NINE faces in how to implement one important management and communication practice, performance feedback, across its different business units and virtual cross-cultural teams. Performance feedback is seen as one important way in which MNEs can more fully tap and develop the talents of their diverse employees as well as provide some sense of the organization's direction and objectives (Schuler, et al., 1991). There can, however, be significant differences in how individuals in different cultures provide and seek performance feedback (De Luque & Sommer, 2000). This is true even though performance feedback in many countries involves the similar premises of how to control and motivate employees (Nakane, 1972; Ouchi, 1981; Staw, 1980) through developing performance norms, monitoring employees on those norms, and assigning responsibility for action based on these norms (Sullivan, et al, 1986).
This article illustrates how a multinational enterprise can develop a competitive advantage from its management practices, such as performance feedback, by using organizational learning to understand the impact of national culture on employee behaviors and then develop more effective management systems throughout the organization. First we present...