Flextronics

Flextronics International Ltd.

Flextronics International Ltd. is an American supply chain solutions company that provides all services of design, manufacture and distribution to different global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as computing, digital, industrial, mobile and medical. With its base in the Silicon Valley and headquarters in Singapore, this Fortune 500 Company operates and manufactures in more than 30 different countries, and provides employment to over 200,000 employees worldwide.   Like many other companies that do business on such a large platform, Flextronics faced many cultural challenges with regard to Human Resources.
What sets the success of any organization in the future apart from the rest, is its ability to bring together a diverse network of people with varying perspectives and views and use it to its advantage. Because of the magnifying size of their global workforce, the human resource challenges faced by Flextronics was overwhelming and strenuous. One of their hardest tasks was global reporting; it was a tedious effort and a lot of times were not accurate. Over the years, Flextronics had grown and built its name through numerous mergers and acquisitions, creating over 80 different HR systems on the way. The downside of this great feat however was they didn’t foresee how difficult it would be to manage all of these; especially since most locations acted independent of each other and weren’t coordinated. Lack of communication and a confusing flow of information made parts of the company highly inefficient.
Keeping in mind Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the reasons that most explain the situation Flextronics experienced can be narrowed down to power distance, uncertainty avoidance and individualism vs collectivism. People in some cultures might experience a higher degree of unequally distributed power at the workplace compared to some others, where there forms an emotional gap between the employers and their...