Different perspectives concerning communication in a global company

The international company used in this study has their head quarters located in Sweden. This is a ‘born global’ company which means that they are not bound to a home market; instead they use the world as their market. It does not mean they passed over their home market and went global directly, but their main market was not their home market. The company is international, present on four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America), which means it has many different cultures within the organisation to consider. This has also affected how people communicate and understand each other in the organisation. The purpose of this thesis is to gain an understanding of how an international company shares and communicate information within their organisation in order to see how the daily communication works. For example the primary data was gathered through phone interviews. 27 interviews were performed with subsidiaries including headquarters from 21 countries. The interviewees had different positions, such as CEO’s, sales assistants, IT-technicians etc. The results of the interviews showed different opinions on how the communication within the company functions. These views has been analysed further in order to see what kind of underlying factors that affected their opinions. What was found was a lack of knowledge in English from several of the subsidiaries. It was also found that the company has some underlying behaviours that affect how they communicate and share information. This to some extent could be related to the workload in the company. Another issue raised was that some had difficulties using the organisational software Guda. Therefore, more training could be necessary for the employees that have problems with the software. This issue is closely related to the fact that the IT-department has too much work to do. It can therefore be suggested that if the employees got more training in the company’s software, the IT-department would have less work to do and can focus more on maintenance. More issues and solutions have been discussed in detail in chapters four and five. There are also implications for managers in chapter six, which deals with some of the main issues discussed in chapter four and five