Cultures, diversity, attitudes, languages, gender, food, habits, time zones, work, rewards, structure, education, religion, legal systems and emotions………, the list of such words keeps on increasing in this global economy and the multicultural corporate world. This article gives us a brief idea about how to cope with cross-cultural challenges faced by HR managers and employees when the business spreads its wings to foreign lands.

In today's bubbling globalized IT corporate world, there are a lot of changes related to the expansion of business and entry of foreign players in services industry and products manufacturing, increased the need for managing cross-culture teams, and diversity. We experienced tremendous changes in the Indian business when Silicon Valley started handling the outsourced work. Within a short span of time, huge ventures and foreign business have spread all over India and subsequently to the other developing countries. For instance, we can see the Mc Donald entering India, Maruthi exporting cars to European markets and a Fortune 500 Financial Services Company developing an offshore outsourcing relationship with Indian vendors for the development and support of its software and online services. This involved ongoing interactions between a US-based project and technical support staff and counterparts at the vendor sites in India. There are other MNCs like IBM, TCS, Infosys, Ranbaxy and Asian Paints which are handling international human resources.

The basic question is, what are all these companies trying to establish across nations? They are like an "old wine in a new bottle"—nothing but for profits and other pertinent reasons like safety, innovation, market stagnation, huge customer base, cost leverage, low wages. Every business has its own operational and human resource constraints. Still, it has the above mentioned advantages. Today the biggest problem confronted by any organization that wants to go for globalization, is focusing on "Managing a diversified work force". Workforce diversity is not only about employing foreign workforce or about representing all the sections of the society, irrespective of differences like age, gender, ethnicity, language, religion, caste, creed, cultural heritage, color, but also going beyond primary dimensions like educational background, work experience and ability to change.

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