Cultural issues in shipping industry : aspect in group compostion

• Main Author: Liao, Shuang
• Other Authors: Kenneth Tan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Communication::Cultural studies
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/64366
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Shipping by its nature is an international and multi-cultural business. Today, globalization drives multi-culture integration further, which has a significant impact on the shipping industry. Thus, it becomes increasing important to identify and analyze cultural issues in shipping industry. However, there is noticeable lack of in-depth and systematic study on them impact of different cultures. This paper aims to provide a preliminary research on the cultural issues of group composition in context of shipping industry. The significance of the study lies on the insights of influence of cultures on people’s behavior, interaction and performance in different industrial sectors. It will be useful for understanding and interpreting cross-cultural relationships. Preliminary interviewees are conducted industrial professionals from different cultural background to gather their opinions and experience about cultural issues. Subsequently, the analysis will proceed from two perspectives, namely information-processing and social-categorization using the data collected from the interviews. The information-processing section will critically analyze the issues stemmed from different attributes including knowledge, job tenure and status, management style and gender. Diverse group composition (heterogeneous) generates both positive and negative result. For social-categorization section, different types of subgroup will be identified and further evaluate the rationale and impact. Stereotype is acknowledged as a cause for inter-cultural conflict. However, it is argued that heterogeneous team achieve better cohesion than homogeneous teams in some cases. The analysis demonstrates that different group compositions have advantages and disadvantages. The key point will be how to strategize flexibly and intelligently according to needs and circumstances.