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1.0 Introduction介绍
随着中国经济的发展和全球化的深化，越来越多的中国企业成为跨国企业。跨国企业面临着许多风险。其中，文化冲突是企业国际经营失败的重要因素之一。本文的研究对象是华为，成立于1987年，位于中国深圳，30多年来，华为逐步发展成为一家在全球多个国家都有业务的全球性公司（林、刘、韩、陈，2018），从21世纪初开始，华为就开始了探索欧美市场。英国是华为最重要的市场之一，英国市场成熟，市场规模大，示范效果好。如果华为能在英国市场取得成功，对华为在全球市场的成功有很大帮助。华为已经在英国市场工作了10多年，并在英国市场取得了成功。但是，要想在英国市场取得成功，还需要进一步完善管理、营销、公关、品牌形象等诸多方面。从企业内部来看，华为是一家跨国中国公司，员工来自世界各地。员工的文化背景差异很大。华为的企业文化强调狼一样的企业文化，鼓励员工加班。企业文化不符合大多数全球企业文化和国家文化。因此，对于华为而言，如何协调企业狼文化与员工背景文化之间的差异，是其管理成功的关键因素。从公司外部来看，华为是中国最好的公司。然而，欧美消费者长期以来对中国企业抱有负面的成见，华为的企业文化与英国的商业文化也存在着诸多冲突。华为需要采取合理的跨文化措施来解决。本文以华为英国分公司为例，探讨其当前跨文化管理的特点，并分析其不足之处，为华为的改进提出建议。本文首先介绍了跨文化管理的相关理论，包括社会认知理论、刻板印象理论和跨文化领导理论。然后，通过对华为当前跨文化管理措施的评价，提出并分析了华为当前跨文化管理措施的改进建议。
With the development of China's economy and the deepening of globalization, more and more Chinese enterprises have become multinational enterprises. Multinational enterprises face many risks. Among them, cultural conflicts are one of the most important factors for the failure of international business operations of the enterprises. The research object of this paper, Huawei was founded in 1987 in Shenzhen, China, in more than 30 years, Huawei has gradually developed into a global company with operations in many countries around the world (Lin, Liu, Han and Chen, 2018), since the beginning of the 21st century, Huawei has begun to explore the European and American markets. The UK is one of Huawei's most important markets, because the UK market is mature, the market is large, and the demonstration effect is good. If Huawei can succeed in the UK market, it is of great help for the success of Huawei in the global market. Huawei has been working in the UK market for more than 10 years, and has already succeeded in fastening in the UK market. However, if it wants to succeed in the UK market, it needs to further improve its management, marketing, public relations, brand image and many other aspects. Judging from the internal of the enterprise, Huawei is a multinational Chinese company, its employees come from all over the world. The cultural background of employees varies greatly. Huawei's corporate culture emphasizes the wolf-like corporate culture and encourages employees to work overtime. The corporate culture does not match most of the global corporate and national cultures. Therefore, for Huawei, how to coordinate the difference between the corporate wolf culture and the background culture of employees is a key factor in its management success. Considering from the outside of the company, Huawei is the best company in China. However, European and American consumers have long negative stereotypes about Chinese companies, and there have been many conflicts between Huawei’s corporate culture and British business culture. Huawei needs to take reasonable cross-cultural measures to solve it. This article takes Huawei's UK branch as an example to discuss the characteristics of its current cross-cultural management, and analyze the shortcomings to suggest for Huawei's improvement. This paper first introduces the relevant theories of cross-cultural management including social cognitive theory, stereotype and cross-cultural leadership theories. Then it presents and analyzes Huawei's current cross-cultural management measures, by evaluating these measures to propose improvements.
2.0 Main body主体
2.1 Literature review 文献综述
2.1.1 Social cognitive theory社会认知理论
In order to achieve the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication, whether the two sides can correctly understand the self culture, other cultures and each other's language structure is an important prerequisite (Nadeem, Raza, Kayani, Aziz and Nayab, 2018). Lack of a correct understanding of each other's culture and language and behavioral habits can only lead to the failure of cross-cultural communication. Scholars have studied factors affecting cognition in terms of context, personality characteristics and scenarios. First, in cultural dimension theory, it believes that the culture of each country has a difference between high-context culture and low-context culture (Hou, Fan, Tan, Hua and Valdez, 2018). The language expressed by people with high-context culture contains more implicit meaning than low-context culture, while the language of low-context culture is more direct. In cross-cultural communication, both parties in communication must have an accurate understanding of each other's context, in order to correctly understand each other's literal and implied meanings, by using appropriate language to accurately communicate.
Second, Usunier’s (2011) research indicates that cross-cultural management usually requires correct understanding of other cultures, but often neglects people's perception of their own culture. For individuals in a strong culture, correct perception of their own culture can prevent them from imposing their own opinions on others, thus avoiding cultural conflicts. For individuals in a weak culture, a correct understanding of their own culture can enhance their confidence in their own culture and help them to achieve better cross-cultural communication.
Third, people's understanding of other cultures comes from cognition, which is also influenced by contextual factors. Nadeem, Raza, Kayani, Aziz and Nayab (2018) believe that context information such as competition, unequal status, conflict of goals and unfairness has a significant negative impact on cognition. Context information such as uneasiness, feeling threatened and being frustrated may also have negative consequences for cognition. In the process of cross-cultural management, management should try to avoid the negative impact caused by context factors on employees, otherwise it is easy to lead to cultural conflicts between employees of different cultural backgrounds.
2.1.2 Stereotype
In terms of cross-cultural communication theories, different scholars have different definitions of stereotypes in their discussions, but they all tend to be derogatory. For example, Ward and Ravlin (2017) believe that stereotype is the wrong judgment formed by people in all cultures for the characteristics of members of different cultural groups. At the same time, they also hold that if some traits in a heterogeneous culture recur, people will think that these traits apply to all people in the culture, so stereotypes are easy to form. McCrae, Chan, Jussim, Fruyt and Terracciano (2013) consider stereotypes to be expectations or ideas that exaggerate the characteristics of a particular cultural group. Stereotypes are an over-generalization of the identity of a group without considering the individual characteristics of that group. Bartel-Radic and Giannellon (2017) emphasize the over-generalization of stereotypes. It is the over-generalization of certain things that makes people's understanding of things too simple, one-sided and exaggerated. Ward and Ravlin (2017) define that stereotypes are fixed concepts formed by people for a certain group, and this concept does not take into account the differences in individual traits.” Hofstede’s dissatisfaction with stereotypes is manifested in that he believes that stereotypes cause long-term incorrect, rigid, one-sided views of one ethnic group to another during cross-cultural communication, which can easily lead to cultural conflicts.
In general, cross-cultural scholars believe that stereotypes are a simple summary of the characteristics of members of other cultural groups. This simplification of understanding does not cover the different characteristics of individuals, leading to misconceptions about other cultural groups as a whole, and these biases will also be solidified to cause cultural conflicts. Therefore, the general attitude to stereotypes in the study and management of cross-cultural communication is negative.
2.1.3 Cross-cultural leadership
Cross-cultural leadership usually refers to the abilities, qualities, and ideas that cross-cultural team leaders should possess (Bird and Mendenhall, 2016). A cross-cultural team is a team of people from different cultures and with different work styles who come together to work together for a common goal. In addition to the problems that arise in general teams, the cross-cultural work team's internal communication problems, membership culture integration issues and the internal values of the members will determine the efficiency of the cross-cultural team and the employees’ recognition of the organization. Cross-cultural leadership has some special characteristics compared to general leadership, such as organizational skills, team building capabilities, and operational capabilities. Hanges, Aiken, Park and Su (2016) believe that cross-cultural communication skills are an important feature of cross-cultural leadership. For example, it is possible to accurately understand the cultural differences between employees of different cultural backgrounds and to accurately convey information in a complex cross-cultural environment. Martinelli and Erzikova (2017) propose that cross-cultural leadership, including cultural integration, requires leaders to learn and understand other cultures correctly, and to integrate other cultures with corporate culture, so that employees of different cultural backgrounds can recognize the culture and values of the company. Hanges, Aiken, Park and Su (2016) point out from the external risks of multinational corporations that cross-cultural leadership also includes cultural interaction ability, which mainly refers to guiding multinational enterprises to interact with local culture and increasing the understanding, acceptance of local consumers to the enterprises.#p#分页标题#e#
2.2 Huawei's cross-cultural management analysis
2.2.1 Conflict between Huawei's corporate culture and culture background of employees in the UK
Huawei's wolf-like corporate culture has two characteristics. One is to encourage employees to work overtime to get more bonuses, the other is based on collectivism, the income of employees is not only affected by the results of individual performance appraisal, but also the results of team performance appraisal (Luo, Cacchione, Junkunc and Lu, 2011). In the UK, employees usually have two characteristics. First, employees think that overtime work is often seen as a problem of bad work efficiency and work pace, which leads to that work cannot be completed in time, so they are usually unwilling to work overtime. Second, British employees are willing to take risks within their own responsibilities, but are not responsible for the team's risk. They believe that as long as everyone is doing what they do, the team's goals can be achieved accordingly. When Huawei’s UK Branch understands these characteristics of British employees, they can adjust the management measures of the company. The measures are mainly to increase bonuses. That is, if local employees in the UK work overtime and they get better team performance, they can get more income than employees in China, in order to encourage Huawei’s British employees to change their mindset to accept Huawei's wolf-like corporate culture.
From the perspective of Huawei's measures, Huawei has seen the differences in corporate culture between the UK and China, and has taken certain measures to make up for these differences, but the problem is that they have errors in the cultural perception of British employees. Paying more money to employees in China can motivate employees to contribute all their energy and time to the company. It is obviously not reasonable for Huawei management to apply its management experience and logic in China to UK employees. According to the theory of Hofstede's cultural differences, there is a big difference between Chinese and British cultures. First, British people are more advocating individualism than Chinese people. Therefore, Huawei's measures that attach importance to collective performance appraisal are difficult to be recognized by British employees. Second, the British do not have a strong feeling as the Chinese have to uncertainty avoidance, so the British do not seek the guarantee of life by making more money like the Chinese. Third, the masculinity of the British society is not as strong as that of China. Therefore, Huawei's practice of giving employees excessive competitive pressure is difficult to be accepted by British employees. All in all, there is a big difference between British culture and Chinese culture. Huawei's attempt to stimulate British employees to accept its wolf-like corporate culture by increasing bonuses is a lack of understanding of British culture, and there is room for improvement in its cross-cultural measures.
Huawei should improve cross-cultural management measures based on the characteristics of British culture. Firstly, British employees are reluctant to accept excessive overtime, but they agree that employees should maintain high work efficiency and intensity. Then Huawei can increase the indicators for assessing the work intensity and efficiency of employees, so that it can meet the habits of British employees and not reduce the overall performance of the company. Secondly, the incentive effect of money for British employees is not as good as it is for Chinese employees, but the needs of British employees for respecting incentives, authorization incentives and achievement incentives are relatively high. Therefore, Huawei should pay attention to the humanization of management while giving reasonable treatment to British employees. , moderately increase their authorization and provide more help and training for the personal development of employees. Finally, it should improve Huawei's holding controlling interest system, which is not just rely on bonuses to motivate employees, so that British employees fully realize that the company's interests are consistent with their own interests. Working hard at Huawei is able to enjoy a reciprocal return, so as to improve the UK's employees’ adaptability to Huawei's wolf-like corporate culture.
2.2.2 Conflict between Huawei’s strategy and British consumer culture
Because some Chinese companies in the past did not abide by business ethics and produced some inferior products, which gave foreign consumers a bad impression for Chinese manufacturing, many European and American consumers formed a stereotype of Chinese products, that is, the price is low, but the product quality and design have very big defects. In order to eliminate the stereotype of British consumers for Huawei, Huawei has adopted a series of measures, including the introduction of some cost-effective mobile phone products, such as the glory series, the price are 10-30% lower than that of other similar products in the UK market, while the quality and function of the products are relatively reliable (Dambrāns, 2016).
Huawei's emphasis on cost-effective marketing strategies has been successful in China because Chinese consumers have lower spending power and the consumer culture focuses on affordable products that they hope to buy with the least amount of money. This is not the case in the UK's consumer culture. Smartphones are a necessity in the UK, and British consumers are willing to spend more on buying good necessities. Therefore, it is difficult for Huawei to further expand its market share in the UK by adopting a cost-effective strategy. Although Huawei's mobile phone has achieved initial success in the UK market and its market share is the third, Huawei is not as good as Samsung and Apple in terms of profitability. Because they are selling mobile phones to get more premiums with the brand image, while when Huawei sell the same grade of mobile phones, the price is often 10% lower (Fu, Sun and Ghauri, 2018).
Therefore, Huawei's marketing in the UK also requires cross-cultural management. First of all, Huawei must re-do its own brand positioning and shape its brand image, abandoning taking low prices as characteristics of its brand image, they should resort to the elements that British consumers like to shape the brand image, including: individuality, creativity, professionalism, youth and so on. Secondly, in terms of brand spokespersons, they can consider those young people who show enough potential and talents, such as the future new football king Kylian Mbappé. It shows to British consumers that although Huawei is also a new brand, it has enough potential to become a world-class brand. Finally, Huawei's mobile phone product design should strengthen the design of the appearance and operation page, and get rid of the past impression of emphasizing practicality, while ignoring the beauty and fashion.
2.2.3 Conflict between Huawei's corporate culture and British business culture
The biggest crisis that Huawei faces in the UK market is the patent crisis. Since entering the UK market, Huawei has faced more than 10 patent litigations and suffered huge fines. In 2017, the England and Wales High Court made a judgment on the long-standing patent licensing dispute between Huawei and UPI (Fan, 2017). In China, due to various reasons, the state's legal system for patent protection is not perfect, and the awareness of patent protection for enterprises in Chinese business culture is not strong. However, in the UK, the legal system is perfect, and special attention is paid to patent protection. Chinese companies may be prosecuted with a little carelessness. In order to cope with these prosecutions, Huawei had to spend huge sums of money to hire a team of lawyers who are familiar with British law and business culture to help Huawei to cope with a series of infringement lawsuits.
Huawei's spending on the lawyers' team can help Huawei to avoid the risks brought by patent litigation, but it does not help Huawei to solve this problem fundamentally. A large part of Huawei's patent litigation is caused by the lack of patent protection in its corporate culture, which is manifested in the lack of awareness of patent protection in the corporate leadership, the lack of effective systems, and adequate training in terms of patent protection, causing unreasonable use or not standardized use of patents of other companies’. This deep-rooted corporate culture is in great conflict with the local business culture of the UK.
In order to reverse the adverse effects of this corporate culture, the heads of Huawei’s departments should play the roles of their own cross-cultural leadership. Firstly, it should train the leaders of each department to understand the norms of patent use and protection in the UK, and then let the leaders pass these ideas and knowledge to their subordinates, and develop appropriate systems to urge employees to comply. Secondly, Huawei's UK employees have a relatively strong sense of patent protection. Leaders of various departments should encourage Chinese employees to learn more from local employees from the UK and encourage local employees to share their patent protection experience with their Chinese colleagues. Finally, Huawei's leaders should communicate with local companies, organizations, and social departments related to patent protection, learn about the latest UK patent protection information and institutional changes, and show them their work, achievements on patent protection. In this way, Huawei can reverse the negative impact from the British society on Huawei's always infringement lawsuits.
3.0 Conclusion
Huawei is one of China's most successful companies in the UK, and it faces many risks. Cultural conflict is one of the most important risks. Considering from the inside of the enterprise, Huawei's wolf-like corporate culture may cause foreign employees’ dislike and difficulty adapting to its corporate culture. From the outside of the company, there have been many negative stereotypes about Chinese companies in the long-term, and there are many conflicts between Huawei's corporate culture and the British local business culture. This also requires Huawei to adopt reasonable cross-cultural measures to solve it. From the perspective of social cognition, it is difficult for Huawei to completely copy its wolf-like corporate culture and management system in China and to use it in the UK. It is necessary for the enterprise to adjust their performance, compensation, and incentive systems without affecting its overall corporate performance, so as to make it match with the values, habits and traditional concepts of local employees. From a stereotype point of view, Huawei's cost-effective products and brand strategy have hindered Huawei from gaining more profits in the UK market. Huawei should be based on the consumer culture of British consumers in choosing smart to adjust its brand and product strategies, as well as the choice of spokespersons, so as to change the local consumers’ stereotypes about Huawei. From the perspective of cross-cultural leadership, Huawei leaders should change the corporate culture in which enterprises do not attach importance to patent protection, and guide employees to form a patent protection awareness to help the company to better integrate and adapt to local business culture.#p#分页标题#e#
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