Human Resource Management - Career management - Essay Writing Assignment Help

Introduction

Human resource practices are an integral part of any company and without these practices a company cannot achieve its long term objectives. Human resource activities are majorly concerned with managing all the activities related to the workforce of an organisation. There are a number of activities that are performed by a human resource department in a company. These functions include recruitment, selection, training, development, performance appraisal, counselling, etc. (Yao & Fan, 2015). It is not necessary that all these functions will have uniform impact in all the situations. When a company becomes a multinational company, all these functions tend to provide different impact over the practices of the company. This implies that when the culture changes the impact of these practices also changes (Adeyemo & Sehoole, 2014). In this manner it is necessary to take into consideration international human resource management. Different cultures have different impact over human resource management practices. The aim of this assignment is to focus on cultural differences and their impact on performance appraisal and recruitment and selection in an organisation. To undertake this various case examples will also be used along with the journals and articles. This analysis will help in comparing and contrasting performance appraisal and recruitment and selection activities in different cultures. Thus, first of all a discussion on performance appraisal and impact of cultural difference on performance appraisal will be taken into consideration using case example and after that a discussion on recruitment and selection and its impact of cultural difference on performance appraisal will be taken into consideration.

Performance Appraisal and impact of cultural differences

Performance appraisal is an activity that deals with various techniques that are used to measure the performance of employees in the organisation. The aim of performance appraisal is to measure the job performance of the employees and is also a part of career development. Performance appraisal provides different results in different cultural context. For an instance Coca Cola uses different methods of measuring performance of its employees in different countries. American culture is very open and they have more concern for money and thus the major objective behind performance appraisal in America is increment in monetary incentives (Budworth, Latham, & Manroop, 2015). In this manner monetary incentives are provided after performance appraisal in American culture. On the other hand when it comes to Japanese culture, they are more concerned with recognition and thus after performance appraisal employees are given recognition and not monetary incentives. This also implies that in American culture if employees will not be given monetary incentives after performance appraisal then they will get disappointed with the practices and same is the case with Japan that if they are not provided recognition after performance appraisal they will get disappointed. This suggests that in different cultures the performance appraisal provides different results. This is why Coca-Cola makes sure that performance appraisal shall be done as per the culture of that particular country otherwise there will be no relevance of the entire process (Chovancová, 2013).

There are a number of methods of performance appraisal and every method provides different results. It depends upon the culture of the organization that which method will be suitable for the organisation. Various methods of performance appraisal include ranking method, paired comparison, confidential report, checklists, graphic rating scales, behavioural anchor rating scales, management by objectives, critical incidents, field review techniques, etc. (Thomas, 2014). It is not necessary that a company uses a single and uniform method in every country where it is operating and same is the case with Coca-Cola. The company uses different techniques of performance appraisal at different cultural context. As per the company there are five dimensions upon which its selection of performance appraisal tool is based. These five dimensions are provided by Hofstede. The five dimensions are long term vs. short term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, individualism vs. collectivism and power distance (Mostafa, Williams, & Bottomley, 2015). The company’s usage of performance appraisal is highly dependent upon these factors in different cultural contexts. This is due to the fact that no society is homogenous, all the cultures are heterogeneous. Here is a comparison of international human resource management of Coca-Cola with respect to the performance appraisal function. In Japan Coca-Cola invests enormous amount to train their employees so that they perform better and this is due to the fact that most of the Japanese firms do that because of the Japanese culture. In Japanese culture the employees are expected to stay loyal to their jobs and they do not switch more often and this is because they have such policies for performance appraisal that employees work for a single company throughout their lives (Gobind, 2014). This enables performance appraisal very smooth in Coca-Cola in Japanese culture. As opposite to Japanese culture, American culture is such that people bounce from career to career and they do not stay in the same company for a long time. Sometimes they do not even stay for a year. This is why performance appraisal practices of Coca-Cola are not very effective in American culture. In Chinese culture gift giving, doing favours and dinners are very common and this has a very huge impact on performance appraisal practices in Chinese culture (Coetzee, Schreuder, & Tladinyane, 2014). In China performance appraisal practices are highly biased and they are based favouritism. This is a very big concern for Coca-Cola because the results of performance appraisal in Chinese subsidiary provide very different results and sometimes these results are not worth taking into consideration for future purpose. In German culture the companies need to closely work as per the norms of the government and their policies and this is why human resource practices are also affected by the governmental policies. This further affects the performance appraisal process in German culture. As a matter of fact German people are more concerned with assertiveness, competitiveness and accumulation of wealth and this is why the companies in German culture shall take care of material possession of employees while rewarding them (Louw-Potgieter, 2012). If in German culture the rewards after performance appraisal are not satisfactory then there are high chances that employees will oppose performance appraisal process. At the same time performance appraisal is based on team work and not individual work. In Swedish culture the performance appraisal is based on individual performance rather than team performance. The major part of Swedish culture is its egalitarian nature and the performance appraisal process shall also respect this cultural aspect. In case of violation of this aspect there will be serious consequences.

In this manner the above illustrations from different cultures suggest that performance appraisal practices do not produce same results in different cultural contexts. Besides the fact that the company is under one brand all the other practices are almost uniform but performance appraisal process cannot be uniform because of workforce diversity (Louw J. , 2013).In every country the culture is different and so is its people and due to that result of performance appraisal also gets affected.

Recruitment and selection and impact of cultural differences

Recruitment and selection are the primary activities of human resource management. Recruitment refers to the set of activities that are designed to find out a suitable candidate for a particular job in an organisation. Selection is followed by recruitment and it denotes the selection of the best candidate from all the candidates as per the fixed criteria of the company. Like all the other functions of human resource management, recruitment and selection are also affected by cultural differences (Festing, Budhwar, Cascio, & Dowling, 2013). With rapid industrialisation and globalisation the companies have started seeking candidates for a job from foreign countries as well and due to that international human resource management practices play a vital role here. Due to changes in culture recruitment and selection activities provides different results. The major aim of recruitment and selection is to provide the most suitable candidate to the company. There are various methods of recruitment and every culture focuses on a particular method. In Coca-Cola, the method of recruitment that is used in Japan is internal recruitment method. In Japanese culture they believe in providing chances of advancements to existing people first and only after that they seek out candidates from outside (Louw G. , 2013).At the same time in Japan they do not prefer to recruit candidates from Parent country or third national country. They give chance to host country candidates. In case, if they start hiring candidates from parent country then other employees will not be happy with that. This is because of the fact that Japanese people are more comfortable in working with people of their culture. This is why recruitment and selection in Japan is highly affected by the culture. At the same time in US it is not so, they just look for the skills. The culture of US is such that they can recruit a candidate from any corner of the world because what they need is skills. Thus, in US Coca-Cola adopt the recruitment practices that involve all the methods of recruitment (Guo & Al Ariss, 2015). It does not matter whether it is internal or external, direct or indirect the only thing is that it should be able to provide best skills.

There are many other cultural factors that affect the recruitment and selection in companies. The cultural factors such as long term vs. short term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, individualism vs. collectivism and power distance have a huge impact on recruitment and selection as well. In Japanese culture, the recruitment on top level position is always based on gender. The Japanese firm do not recruit females to top level position and thus if Coca-Cola recruits female candidates for the top level position it will not be considered to be good in Japanese cultural context (Fratricova, 2010). Along with that Coca-Cola shall also not recruit outsiders or youngsters to the top level positions. In Japanese culture value is given to seniority at the time of recruitment and selection and thus the definition of recruitment and selection is very different in Japanese culture. Like Japanese culture, the culture of China is also such that it preserves its traditions and societal norms. The recruitment and selection practices are highly based on Confucian Philosophy in China. While recruiting and selecting the candidates for a job they take into consideration that whether the employee will value Confucian Philosophy and act as per that or not. In this way the recruitment and selection process in Chinese culture are also internal based and they do not seek candidates from PCN or TCN. This implies that Coca-Cola recruits candidates from HCN in China. In German the recruitment and selection are based on masculinity forces and they believe in assertiveness and competitiveness (Festing, Budhwar, Cascio, & Dowling, 2013). Thus they hire the employees who can enable this in the organisation. In Swedish culture the employees are hired keeping in view a number of polices. This culture is highly concerned about procedures and fixed norms. This suggests that Coca-Cola has to follow different practices for recruitment and section in different countries. Due to the differences in the culture recruitment and selection processes in different countries provide different results.

Conclusion

The analysis on performance appraisal and recruitment and selection activities suggest that a company that is working in multiple countries and performing the same functions needs to change the policies as per the culture. The human resource practices cannot be uniform in all the countries because of cultural diversity of the employees. This further suggests that the argument that human resource practices are affected by the culture is true. The various aspects of performance appraisal and recruitment and selection in Coca-Cola with respect to Japan, China, US, Sweden and Germany made it clear that all the cultures have distinguished features and a company operating in these cultures are bound to follow the norms that are set already in those cultures. A company not following the cultures of respective countries may not be able to achieve success in long run.