Intercultural HRM Teaching and the Management of Diversity: A Cultural Synergy Approach in the Context of Developing Countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTIn Western context, HRM teaching is traditionally following a pedagogical normative model. However, this approach quickly reaches its limits when applied in developing countries. In this regard, this paper aims to understand these limits and to suggest different methods and tools to improve the effectiveness of HRM teaching, particularly in Africa. Results pointed out that HRM teaching must take into account some cultural differences in developing countries. A contingency approach and the introduction of a cultural synergy logic when teaching HRM in Africa are thus discussed.INTRODUCTIONHaving just finished preparing my course on HRM and organizational change, I feel particularly excited. Applying the concept of change in HRM practices has been for me a great source of intellectual inspiration. I love teaching the impact of change intertwined with the current theory on interactionism and situationism, because it reminds me of the intellectual conversations I had with my professors while I was completing my doctoral thesis. While I prepare to go to my first HRM course on African soil on this sunny May morning, these memories cross my mind and remind me that even now, I will have a blast transferring this knowledge to the students I am about to meet. After I presented and unveiled the course outline for the next few weeks at the beginning of the course, I expose HRM concepts in the context of organizational change. I start with a case study, an empirical illustration of a technological change that took place in a Canadian firm that had generated a wave of unexpected resistance from the employees involved. I explain with great enthusiasm the rational basis for the participant's resistance to change, all the while using some theories of action as an analytical framework, which states that any change must engage and actively involve its participants in order for it to be successful. When I present this material in the West, my students respond positively in using personal and work experiences as examples to relate to the theory. Oddly enough, in this African university class, there is no reaction. In fact, nobody says anything. The students listen religiously, but I feel that their spirit just did not follow. I even feel that the subject brings them discomfort. I have a vague impression that the synergy between us is nonexistent, which does not bode well for future meetings. While sorting out my material at the end of the course, a student comes to me and says:Sir, your course was very interesting, very dynamic. However, I cannot rationalize the foundations of the resistance to change that you have incurred. You know, here we think that employees must be very grateful to their boss, not the other way around. It is thanks to him that they can feed their families! No? So, if the boss wants change, we will accept it, because if we do what is asked, the company will succeed, which will help us even more to feed our family. So, in our world, work conditions, motivation and participation, do not really, you know...That is the type of reaction you might get upon arriving in a completely different cultural setting when delivering teaching material on human and social relations. The various theoretical approaches to HRM, as in general management, have often been developed in the West while being based on certain social and cultural parameters in that part of the world. In these circumstances, when attempting to apply these approaches without adapting the material to different cultural settings, there is a high risk of hitting a wall. This phenomenon may sound abnormal at first. However, it might seem more natural if you make the effort to grasp the rational foundations of the culture in which you intend to teach because there is no universal theoretical model for HRM.In this work, our intention is to identify some methods and tools in order to improve the effectiveness of HRM teachings in different cultural contexts. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".