Topic: Growing Cultural Diversity in Singapore
Page 1 of 10
Introduction
Although Singapore is a small nation, it is easy to find the growing cultural diversity in the
current multi-cultural society. In this paper, we will discuss that, in this context, as a Singaporean
company, which aims to establish an organizational culture of service excellence and intends to
serve a multi-cultural customer base, in order to achieve these goals, it has to know its main
facing challenges, external environment -- growing cultural diversity, the importance to take a
differentiation strategy and the majors implications on human capital management.
I) Main Facing Challenges
In a diverse environment, organizational culture of service excellence can be one company’s core
competency, which can serve as a source of competitive advantage to benefit from creating the
loyal customs and to get the above-average return. If the company wants to create and sustain
this capability, it is very important to understand its main facing challenges:
a) Difficult to meet different needs
As we know, Singapore is a multi-cultural country with growing cultural diversity and the people
here from different countries, races, genders, ages have different needs. So it means the
customers are diverse with different needs. It is a multi-cultural customer base. Thus, it is so
difficult to know the different needs of different customers. How to understand and meet the
different needs is one of major challenges in a diverse society. Standard services may not satisfy
all the customers. For example, if the airline companies don’t know 13.3% resident populations
in Singapore are Malays (Statistics Year 2013) and they have special food needs. If they want to
provide service excellence, it must meet this group’s food needs on board.
b) Cross-cultural communication
When employees come to work, they do not usually lay aside their differences, preferences,
cultural custom. People used...