An Analysis Of Cultural Differences In HRM Of Sino-American Joint Ventures

Due to the globalization of world economy and the appearance of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the cooperation between China and the U.S.A. in business is becoming deeper and wider than before. There are much more opportunities for Chinese and American staff to work together. Because they have totally different political systems, laws, regulations, customs and so on, HR managers of Sino-American joint ventures often confront with difficulties in management which are caused by cultural differences between China and the U.S.A. Meanwhile, concepts of western world are coming into our daily life as China is opening to the outside world widely. As a representative of the west, the U.S.A. has already exerted a subtle influence on our daily life. Its different mode of thinking, habits of living and other factors will inevitably lead to cultural conflicts. Human Resource Management (abbreviated as HRM) is just a flat roof of presentation on intercultural communication in this specific economic situation.Therefore, this paper focuses on HRM of Sino-American joint ventures and adopts the related theories of intercultural communication. It analyzes the cultural problems of management in order to provide some effective solutions for HR managers of Sino-American joint ventures.Specifically speaking, besides the trend of development and the writing purpose mentioned above, there are some others reasons for selecting HRM of Sino-American joint ventures as the object of research in this paper. Firstly, HRM contains a series of procedures such as HR planning, recruitment, interview, selection, training, developing, and appraisal. These procedures play an important An Analysis of Cultural Differences in HRM of Sino-American Joint Ventures role in management of joint ventures and business activities. Moreover, people are able to find cultural differences from HRM, such as differences in value, mode of thinking, habits of speaking and so on, because staff of joint ventures have different nationalities and culture clashes occur easily under the circumstances. Making researches on it may be an effective way to find out cultural differences between China and the U.S.A. Furthermore, it may be an easy approach to acquiring knowledge of culture and communication.In terms of the methods adopted to do the research, this paper applies theoretical analysis of cultural problems appearing in HRM of Sino-American joint ventures, then analyzes cases to support what have been stated before, and finally works out a set of scientific and reasonable way of HRM. The theories of research come from intercultural communication. They relate to values, mode of thinking, interpersonal relationship, language, nonverbal communication and speech-act, which are the basic components of intercultural communication.Although quite a few learners and scientists have been engaged in research on HRM in the U.S.A., China, Germany, U.K., Japan, France and some other big countries in the world, they mainly focus on the enterprises'culture. Most of them do not go further to search for the origin of these differences. This paper provides systematical and academic analysis of typical cases concerning HRM of Sino-American joint ventures. The support from intercultural communication theory and the personal opinions on how to solve problems of management make this paper different from the others.This paper is made up of four chapters. In chapter 1, a literature review of HRM and intercultural communication is made. Chapter 2 briefly introduces theory of HRM and intercultural communication, and finds out the intersection of these two subjects. Chapter 3 is the most important part of this paper. It states cultural differences in HRM of Sino-American joint ventures from aspects of values, mode of thinking, language and so on, and analyzes how these cultural differences affect HRM. It also provides solutions to solve them by analyzing typical cases. The theoretical structure of this chapter is constructed by the related theories of intercultural communication and HRM. It is divided into six sections according to six factors of intercultural communication. Procedures of HRM concerning the same cultural difference are listed in each section, and then the analysis of cases follows. Chapter 4 sums up the analysis in chapter 3. It works out a set of effective ways to guide HR managers in the management of their Chinese and American staff in order to achieve the ultimate goal --- making profits.