Intercultural Conflicts Analysis And Intervention Measures Design For Expatriate Managers In A Multinational Company

With the deepening of the global economic integration, the multi-national company (MNC) is playing a more arresting role in the global economy. In the process of doing business beyond national boundaries, MNC may inevitably encounter series of cultural conflicts. As a result, the prior task for MNC goes to how we may eliminate, avoid and prevent the cultural conflicts. Intercultural Conflict can be classified into organizational and individual level. This thesis will put a focal point on the research of conflicts of individual level, that is, the intercultural conflicts between expatriate managers and team members from different cultural backgrounds in a multi-national company.Based on the author's two-year experience in an American corporation, it is assumed in the thesis that most of the expatriate managers have performance issues in communications, especially that with local team members, which present as intercultural conflicts of different levels. Analyzing methods of performance technology are adopted in this thesis for identifying the root causes behind the conflict phenomenon that produce performance gaps against our expectations. Then, strategies and interventions are put forward correspondingly. By refining the intercultural competency of group of expatriate managers, it is expected that the intercultural conflicts and communication barriers can be proactively prevented to the most extent.For the methodology part, grounded theory method is adopted to detect the intercultural root cause for conflict situations of expatriate managers in daily communication. Five representative expatriate managers were invited to take the pre-tests and multi-dimensional profound interviews for field data. The final root causes for performance gaps go into three main categories as communication barriers, cultural context issues, and value selection issues. In the last part of the research, corresponding interventions are designed and categorized for particular conflict causes; then a comprehensive and systematic Aiding Bag of Intercultural Competencies is addressed to prevent potential intercultural conflicts and ultimately improve communication performance of expatriate managers through interventions in knowledge cognition, expressive analysis and behavior skill mastery.