11 July 2005

Need to look for some defination for work culture. There are 3 different catogories of cultures in organisations,

• namely inter culture - same group of people belonging to a specific race;
• intra culture - people of different races;
• and cross cultural - expatriates working with locals.

We have these kinds of scenarios in Malaysia. In these cultures we will also have to see other aspects such as:

• level of education - we have local graduates, foreign graduates and those who have not experienced university education;
• some of the workers have gone to national type schools, i.e. Chinese, Indian and Religious schools, they see work differently; and
• in organisations seniority and gender too play a role where the young are seen as ambitious and energetic compared to the seniors, as for some ladies, they see work as just trying to add to the household income.

Dont get me wrong in these issues, there is some reality in all of these. Everything mentioned above will have to be justified, if some sort of work has been done on the above, I will be grateful is somebody can share it with me. There are definitely more issues to be discussed as the list is non exhaustive.