Abstract
With an ongoing globalization of activities and companies, heterogeneity in companies' workforce has become a reality. Managing diversity has turned into a major challenge for companies' survival. As a matter of fact, large companies can no longer boast their national affiliation as the workplace is gradually turning into a general melting pot of people as well as work practices on a daily basis.
The impact of multiculturalism has evolved through time depending on the type of competitive environment and the firm's overall strategy. Today, no major firm operates in purely domestic environments.
Intercultural management is based on the analysis of cultural differences. These terms can only make sense once the concept of culture has been defined and cultural areas are set up, so as to allow comparison. Nevertheless, the word culture in itself refers to a lot of different meanings, hundreds as a matter of fact. However, the anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckohn offered one of the most comprehensive and generally accepted definition:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditioning elements of future action.
Moreover the concept of cross-cultural management is another core concept because it not only explains how culture affects people's behaviors around the world (especially in business), but also explains how these differences can be dealt with. It has developed useful tools for entreprises which wish to prepare themselves adequately to the challenges of the 21st century.
