UK and Germany: A cultural perspective

In modern market place, with fewer borders, the majority of the businesses, not only large corporations but also medium enterprises, have gone outside of their home countries and are looking for opportunities in overseas markets. Companies choose different approaches to enter and operate in the foreign markets. Some join their forces with non-competitors through merges, others expand through acquisitions.

As a result of this joint ventures and alliances business people from different cultures are brought together to a single table to build up common strategy and find ways for successful collaboration. In order to facilitate fruitful and mutually beneficial partnership between companies from different cultures and people within them, employees, mainly at the higher managerial levels, should be willing to develop an approach for cooperation and dealing with each other.

In order to establish such form of relationship the knowledge of cultural distinctive features and understanding the point of view of opposite party play very important role.

German soldier's "Auf Wiedersehen" (LOC)

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Knowing the reason and explanation behind certain actions and forms of communications will also help avoiding misinterpretation which in business world can be very important and cost a contract or gainful partnership. Though conducting cultural analysis will only enable to get a general picture of people's behavior and their core business values, it will contribute a great deal in establishing cross-cultural relationships and smoothing many related issues.

Presented case study we will attempt to analyze differences in operating between German and British companies and challenges that managers of those companies are likely to face when dealing with each other.

It is important to note that differences in cultural perspectives among UK and German management starts from the role of education and age group of the managers. In Germany about two thirds of managers and supervisors, apart from general management education, have undergone...