Australia and New Zealand: Doing Business in Indonesia

Australia and New Zealand: Doing business with Indonesia

SECTION 1

Cultural Differences:

Many Australian and New Zealand organizations are seeking business opportunities in Asian countries as these Asian countries are in developing phase and they offer vast business opportunities to already developed nations. Here, we are going to analyze the business expansion of Australian and New Zealand organizations in Indonesia. During Global expansion of a business, it is very important to understand the culture and cultural differences between your country and the other country in which you are going to expand your business. This will help in developing better relationship and in the long term it will help the businesses to penetrate globally.

The New Zealand and Australian culture is very different from the culture of Asian countries. To analyze the cultural differences between these countries it is very important to understand the meaning of culture first.

Understanding Culture:

Culture is basically the behavior and beliefs of a particular ethnic or social group. It is a way of working, thinking or behaving in a place or organization. While doing business in global market it is very important to learn about the culture to decrease the complexities and challenges. In other words we can say that cultural understanding is synonym for a successful business.

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions: 

Hofsetede has categorized cultural differences into three wide categories i.e National culture, Business Culture and Organizational culture. National culture depicts the political and cultural boundaries of the nation. Business culture involves rules, regulations, values and beliefs of doing business in a particular culture. Whereas, organizational culture illustrates the norms and beliefs that the people follows in an organization.

National Culture dimensions are as follows:

Power Distance

Individualism vs Collectivism

Masculinity vs Femininity

Uncertainty Avoidance

Long Term Orientation

Indulgence

The bar graph attached in Appendix 1 shows how these three countries differ from each other on the basis of above mentioned dimensions. In all the dimensions, Australia and New Zealand are almost at one level and showing wide deviation from Indonesia. The graph shows that Indonesia is at high power distance as compare to other two countries which means more dependence on hierarchy. For Individualism, Indonesia’s score is very low as compared to Australia and NZ, it implies that they prefer well defined social framework. Indonesia is less masculine than other Asian countries which means that people do consider status and success as a main driving force which motivates them, which is quite similar to Australia and NZ. For the Uncertainty avoidance dimension, all these three countries are pretty much at the same moderate level which means that their mood conflicts are not shown their work behavior. They believe in maintaining harmony in their work place. In long term orientation, Indonesia’s score is very high as compare to others which means that they are more realistic and down to earth and they are very adaptive by nature. Indonesia has very low indulgence score, they don’t emphasize much on their leisure time, they worry more about their society and social norms which is opposite to Australian and NZ culture.