Joint Venture of the France Based Company Alcatel

A vocalise take chances, jibe to Adler and Graham (1989),along with nuclear fusion reactions and acquisitions, licensing and distribution agreements, and sales of products and services critical aspects of all more than than(prenominal) inter arrangingal relationships, are face-to-face negotiations. This would mean the interaction amid people. In instantlys society, as the world gos much more globalized than we could ever say of, with the fast growth of the inter dismiss industry, we are connected with people from other country at an instant.However, concern to business deals and negotiations are still at a stage where face-to-face communication is still required. As interpersonal communication is brought onto the table, with the clash of contrary floricultures as companies today all commit the tendency to take globalizes and multi-nationalized, the lowstanding of anothers culture and ethnical values plays an important role in the negotiation, and the interactions thereafter. As the proportion of immaterial to domestic trade increases, so does the frequency of business negotiation amongst people from different countries and cultures.To in(predicate)ly manage these negotiations, businesspeople need to complete how to influence and communicate with members of cultures other than their hold (Adler and Grahamd (1989)). Through the analysis of the case study on the conjugation make believe of the France establish come with Alcatel and the U. S. behindd comp whatever Lucent Technologies, issues of cross- pagan management, the weakness and strength of an international joint venture, including the rights and wrongs of the particular case study will be discussed.As Shenkar (2001)said in an article, establishing a measure gauging the distance between cultures has understandably presented an even great challenge. At the end, recommendations will be provided for future companies seeking joint ventures. clay The major differences between the i nitial negotiation in 2001 and the final successful negotiation in 2006 was the division of powerfulness. In 2001, in the original negotiation, the base comp all was Lucent, which was based in the US. Because it was a joint venture, the amount of power on Alcatel cannot be decided.Due to this inequality, the joint venture was cal take off in 2001. In 2006, as this inequality no longer stands between the cardinal companies, it established the final negotiation of the joint venture, and at least in the beginning, both companies were satisfied with the negotiation. According to Barkema and Vermeulen (1997), differences in uncertainty avoidance and long-run orientation cause problems. Differences in how IJV partners perceive and adapt to opportunities and threats in their surround are more difficult to re shed light on.Cultural differences regarding power distance, individualism and masculinity are more easily resolved because they are mainly reflected in different attitudes toward s the management of personnel, several(prenominal)thing firms can make explicit agreements virtually originally entering the partnership. As Berkema and Vermeulen (1997) already said, issues on power distance, individualism and masculinity are con lieured to be more easily resolved cultural issues, and realizing the detail that if the joint venture between Alcatel and Lucent Technologies could not even solve the more easy problems, it is pointless to say the success of the negotiation.Since the merger in 2006, it is now the fifth year for the joint venture to be in business. With the resignation of Russo, the company is now led by The company is under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Ben Verwaayen and the non-executive Chairman of the Board is Philippe Camus. Verwaayen and Camus conjugated the company in the third quarter of 2008 after Alcatel-Lucents first chief operating officer Patricia Russo and first Chairman Serge Tchuruk resigned.For 2008, the company posted rev enues of 16. 984 billion and a net loss of 5. 215 billion (Alcatel-Lucent (2009)). As Powell and Dent-Micallef (1997) found in their article, ITs alone buzz off not produced sustainable performance advantages in the retail industry, but that some firms have gained advantages by using ITs to leverage intangible, complementary human and business resources such as flexible culture, strategic planningIT integration, and supplier relationships.The results backup man the resource-based approach, and help to explain why some firms outperform others using the same(p) ITs, and why successful IT users often fail to sustain IT-based competitive advantages. Alcatel-Lucent has do what it was suppose to do a long time ago, which was to appoint leaders based on expertise, and not nationality. As the entire industry was firing downhill during 2006, for the past few years, with the correct leadership of Verwaayen and Camus, the joint venture is in much better shape than it was before.As Tchuruk commented initially that the merger is a giant transatlantic experiment in multicultural diversity, the company has run into some major cross-cultural problems since its merger in 2006. ane major issue is the fact that the appointed CEO of the joint venture could not effectively run the business, resulting in six quarterly losses, which led to the restructuring of the company, and a cut of 16,500 jobs in total. As the case study posits, it was a poor decision to appoint leaders based on their nationality rather than skills.For the time that Russo was CEO, she struggled greatly to bring together a company that consisted of deuce entirely different cultures, especially when she has no background intimacy of any French language at all. In addition, because there was a miss of understanding between the cultures, the two companies, although formed as a joint venture, were literally pushed into each other out of desperation because of the down glide industry. However, more important ly, it was the cultural clash that brought the JV into a poor state initially.As Adler, Doktor, and Redding (1986) wrote in their article, with the growing shift of business from the Atlantic to the peaceful Basin, East-West cultural differences are becoming increasingly significant. Research in developmental psychology, sociology, and anthropology shows that there are major differences among the cognitive processes of people from different cultures. In the era of the global corporation, cultural diversity has to be recognized, understood, and appropriately employ in organizations.It is suggested that cross-cultural management would greatly benefit from comparative studies considering the advert of the cognitive aspects of culture on managerial practice. Moving forward as a combined company, the JV faces great competition from low-cost Chinese rivals, and as the internet technology is increasingly changing the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is faced with much deeper challenges as deman d in the entire industry is decreasing tremendously. nonetheless one challenge would overly be the challenge to integrate the French culture with that of the American Culture. As Shenkar (2001) pointed out, establishing a measure gauging the distance between cultures has understandably presented an even greater challenge. With the globalization of the firm into the Eastern side of the world, and with the JV servicing clients all over the globe, it is not hard to study the importance of cross-cultural management as the firm takes its role onto the global stage.In Ralston et al. (1993)s research on onvergence/divergence of managerial values, the four Western-developed measures (Machiavellianism, locus of control, intolerance of ambiguity and dogmatism) and the four dimensions of the Eastern-developed Chinese Value flock (Confucian dynamism, human-heartedness, integration, and moral discipline) were used to find that often times both culture and the business environment interact t o create a unique delimitate of managerial values in a country. It is the values of the management, the values of a company, that makes up the success of an industry. ConclusionSoderberg and Holden (2002) defines cross cultural management as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters between what are perceived as well-defined and homogeneous entities the organization and the nation-state, and offering tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miscommunication. However, in the business world today, with its transnational companies that face the challenges of the management of global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, interacting and collaborating across boundaries using global communication technologies. at that place is the need for an alternative approach which acknowledges the growing complexity of inter- and intra-organizational connections and identities, and offers theoretical concepts to think about orga nizations and multiple cultures in a globalizing business context. Todays world has become a big clash of all different types of culture. Not only it is seen in the business world, but this clash of cultures has become part of todays society, and the whole world.This phenonmenon not only suggests more research topics for scholars, as Thomas and Mueller (2001) said in their study, that the relationship between culture and four personality characteristics commonly associated with entrepreneurial motivation. By demonstrating taxonomical variation in entrepreneurial characteristics across cultures, we raise important questions about the boundaries of international entrepreneurship research and the challenges of transcending them, in the real world, cross-cultural management is also becoming more important and is discussed and faced by many entrepreneurs in the business world.With the case study of Alcatel from France and Lucent Technologies from United States as an example, it has tur n up the fact that the importance of understanding the different cultures that ones engage in, and the importance of acknowledging cross-cultural management has become a requirement for any company leading to a JV or entering into a foreign country. Everyone country has its own unique culture, and every country has its own set of rules. In order to gain profit, in order to become globalized, one must take the time to learn about the culture, and go by their rules, because ultimately, in the business world, you are never alone.