Intercultural Issue: Petrovietnam

Cultural issue

Executive Summary:

Intercultural has become one of the main reasons for the failure of an international

cooperation  or  project  and  Petrovietnam   (PVN)  stands  no  exception.  One  of

PVN’s  oversea  oil  exploration  and  production  projects  is  implemented  in

Venezuela. There are many difficulties in implementing this project, including the

lack of key Vietnamese personnel and engineers. The reason is that  PVN wished to

put  the  PVN’s  culture  in  Venezuela  but  it  has  not  considered  all  unexpected

elements influencing on the  working and living condition of their personnel.  PVN

has applied a common policy of salary for all experts working in joint operation

project in order to avoid the conflict among them, however  in  Venezuela project,

this salary level is considerably low comparing with the other Venezuela personnel

at  the  same  qualification,  experience  and  job,  which  made  the  employee  feel

unfair.  In addition, PVN also forgot that  that the Vietnamese tightly bound with

their families and homeland.

The problem has been carefully studied  base on the fact of what PVN had done

and by the information collected from the employees working and left the project.

After  that,  we  have  come  up  with  some  solutions  to  solve  the  problem.  For  the

short term solution, PVN could (i) change the working period of the engineer so

they  could  go  back  to  Vietnam  more  frequently,  (ii)  transfer  the  personnel  who

have experience in working other oversea project to work for this project. And for

the long term solutions, PVN should (i) have the  appropriate rate in the  salary for

PVN’s personnel working in Venezuela, (ii) selecting young engineers with high

motivation, (iii) support employees’ family to move to Venezuela to live or work

and using Vietnamese staffs for supporting services such as: cooking, cleaning etc.

Cross-culture Management        Group 6- iEMBA 13

th

Class - AITVN

Introduction

Petrovietnam  (PVN)  is  one  of  the  Nation’s  Leading  Business  Groups,  plays

extremely important role in national industrialization and modernization   with the

main activities/business in  oil and  gas  exploration and  production. PVN’s annual

growth  rate  has  been  20  -25%,  accounting  for  18-20%  of  GDP  and  about  30%

State  budget  revenue.  It  has  the  revenue  of  US$  32  billion  in  2011.  The  total

workforce  of  PVN  is  60,000  with  the  number  of  subsidiaries  is  41.  PVN  is

transnational organization with  the number of joint operation companies is 15 and

the number of oversea exploration and production projects is 23 [1]