Training Methods In A Multinational Corporation Business Essay

Since past few decades, it can be known that excellence in human resource plays a vital role for improving productivity, business performance and overall companies’ growth. To gain best and to maintain its performance of human capital, it is very important to invest in human capital through education and Training. Effective employee training is not only important to raise long term services and economic growth, but it also provides a unique and differentiated position which improves the standard and quality of creation out coming the regular innovation and high productivity and profitability. From an employee perspective, these same factors are crucial and critical for skill development and career advancement (Anderson, 1998).

Training is a process of learning through professional development. So understanding that how today international business is can successfully manage their human resources across different countries is a major issue for management practitioners in this fast growing world. This Globalization has placed a platform to many large corporations to increase their business activities internationally.

In this topic we are going to discuss the difference between training methods in multinational companies in India and United States of America (U.S.A). We will consider the cross-cultural point of view fundamentals to understand the difference as well as the similarity and the implementation of India and USA which targeted the high expectation of better outcome within their enterprises. This essay will evaluate and give attention to the understanding of the both cultural background as well as their working environment to focus the expectation of each countries. This essay also presents various points of the Training system and explains the how it generally operates within the enterprises; this will help us to know how knowledge transfer is done in a better way to achieve better performance in the workforce.

IMPORTANCE OF TRAINING

Why Training is important?

Training has been a subject of study for management and education literature. For career advancement employee training plays a crucial role in this changing work environment all over the world from past three decades; even training improve performance in their present job, learn new skills and create demand at their workplace. The change in technology, economy, demographic and other forces constantly creates a requirement of learning for the work force (Bhawuk, 2001).

Training is important for introducing new concepts to workgroup for bringing in new system which may cover wide range new skills, different working environment, concepts and all the other factors which play an aggressive role for the company. It is must that a complete, effective and consistent training program is developed in order to motivate the staffs for acquiring new skills which is always profitable for the company. A superior training act as a building block of practical and technical skills required for his or her position (J. Monahan). The performance of the team suffers due to lack of skills in the team leaders for any assignment and which has additional impact on the organization in present and even in future. This lack on skills will also affect the work of staff working under team leaders and the staff working in the head offices. So it is important to draw the attention to the need to invest in employee’s training and development as the organization’s performance can be affected by neglecting such a need (Bozionelos & Lusher, 2003).

Building Multicultural/ Transnational Team

The dependence upon the team composed of managers from a range of different culture and countries is now a commonplace practice in multinational firms, and it’s a future aspect to work in a multitude way (Ravlin, Thomas, & Ilsev, 2000). These teams are also known as transnational teams or multinational teams.

”A multinational team, in contrast to teams from a single culture, entails differences among members in language, interpersonal styles, and a host of other factors. Such differences can create a balance (cohesion and unity) or an imbalance (subgroup dominance, member exclusion, and other undesirable outcomes), depending on how they are handled”- Earley and Gibson (2002).

To build multinational teams we need to achieve 3 interrelated goals in order to be successful.

Create a shared culture.

Manage team conflict effectively, and

Motivate members to invest time on behalf of the team (Gibson & Earley, 2005).

Achieving these goals simultaneously is not easy for any team but is particularly difficult for the multinational team. So the multinational companies should train people with cultural differences, learning styles, etc… As discussed above.

So collectively we can develop a multinational team through experience and even this process can be more strengthen if we keep strong hybrid norms and positive feedback. So building a transnational team is not so easy, it should be even have training for Repatriation, because to retain experienced and successful international managers is much more important to multinational companies.

Multinational training practices in India and United States of America

In Previous time, parents US based companies controlled the operations of their affiliates or subsidiaries in India by exporting their standardized Human resources management practices into the affiliates to ensure business effectiveness. This is known as an ethnocentric approach (Perlmutter, 1996). Lately the government of India was modernizing the trade liberalisation in the country during the id of 1991.For example an Indian Company i.e. Maruti Udyog, a public sector undertaking which manufactures cars in collaboration with Suzuki of Japan. Maruti Udyog had adopted the Japanese management style of training and building (Sapra, 1995).The uncertainty avoidance according to Hofstede dimensions (Hofstede Homepage), likely that building of trust and being a global player was very much low (Sharma, 1994). As we can see the cultural difference plays an important role in Training people. So from the above analysis we can find out that India is likely to adapt the training methods of US as considering to this essay.

After the Boom of IT Industries in India, the Indian training system was the mixture of western style what is called as Hybrid System (Friedman, 2006).The new training system of India is also creating the same environment into relation with the training in USA, this is because the most IT investors are from USA. So the training methodologies are adopted from US companies and implemented in India with slight modification taking cultural aspect into consideration.

According to Hofstede, power distance refers to the degree to which a society accepts a hierarchical or unequal distribution of power in organizations. United States of America is ranked as the lowest then compared to India. American Managers have very low degree tolerance of unequal power distance, which is vivid contrast to the managers of India. So the knowledge of Indian managers have relatively greater tolerance of unequal power distribution may be useful in helping us to understand certain training methods, for example lecturing, are more acceptable in Indian managers than their American counterpart. In lecturing, a great power distance tends to exist between the lecture and trainees.

According to my personal experience in India is more towards theoretical approach way of learning things, where as America is more towards practical learning. To back up this statement, in my previous company back in India where I worked for a software Industry, as a prominent example, if a new software arrives into a market, Our training session for the new product would be a theoretical based. In India we used to give documents to learn about the new product. Even I had a change to go to USA for a software training program and they have a different approach , they have less theory and more of practical training, as the training was conducted we had hands on experience on the product. The practical way of learning is much easier than the theoretical way. To enhance the productivity they focus more on practical approach of training, this is the major difference I found in multinational companies in India and USA.

Design of cross culture Training between India and USA

It is very important to focus upon cultural specific training. A study by Hun and Jenkins (2000) will tell the difference in training methods in India and USA.

Time Punctuality: In USA the starting time and ending time are very important, but in India it may be considered as exceptional. In India we have got flex timings and which may be acceptable.

Linguistic barriers: English has become a business language all around the world, but most translation change with the county context. For example the pronunciation of America significantly differs from Indian way. Secondly certain terms may different meaning in different languages; India has 18 official languages and if it a government organization training it should be translated into official state language .

Different meeting practices: When conducting training sections in USA, Hofstede (2001) dimensions like power distance says that USA has a low power distance and employee/ trainee may tend to call the boss/ trainer with their first name while it is impossible in India where it has high power distance.

Body language and greeting: The way emotions are expressed in various cultures may differ, for example in India we greet people by joining our hands and say “Namaste” and where as in USA hand gesture conveys greeting of people (Pandey, 2004).

Training programs are more knowledge aquisition programs (Black & Mendenhall, 2001). Such training programs can be benifited to both local and parent companies to promote collaboration and knowledge exchange.Even subsidiries with highly skilled will be sometimes unsucessful in transfering his/her knowledge because of lack of training and support.

Analysis

Looking at both the countries and comparing between the India and USA the difference are:

1. The recruitement process in United States of America are more complex and tough due to their professional point of reference. Which is related to the orentation and introduction in India considered to be much complicated than United States of America (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000).This fact relate with and tell us the amount of time Indian organization spend on training.

2. USA has a more organized and more flexible system and can move across different responsibilities or task, but in India everyone is associated with a specific task and job title and has more job security than USA (Kabst, 2004).

3. India is a multi-religious country of various believes, so in any kind of training there should be not using individualistic visual stances or sexual portrayals of women that can hurt the values of Indian culture, where as in USA we can use those kinds of images (Ahmed, 2000).

CONCLUSION:

Altering nature of the workplace senses the requirement of additional training program. Globalization, internationalization of economy, employ of multicultural team and increased organizational diversity shows world is turning more cross cultural. In today’s world culture plays a chief role in any multinational corporation – it cannot be ignored. To face the challenges and meet the requirement in this increased internationalization of business additional training programs are critical.

Human resource is a key ingredient in the successful operations of MNC’s, without which all other resources could not be efficiently utilized. Training and development program will help us to uses maximum utilization of resources. As many large enterprises are going global, so we need more of cultural training to increase efficiency of any enterprise. It is very important that Human resource manager should be aware of cultural differences in training and development.

The comparison between India and United States of America comes to believe that the training methods in Multinational Companies are almost same; the only difference is the cultural background. As we have first discusses generally why training is an important factor of any MNC’s. Then we looked how to build Transnational teams with a brief description. We even looked upon the main difference between India and US training differences, which has only slightly change dude to the cultural values of India.