Factors of Culture Adaptation and Adaptation States in a Multicultural Organization.

Most adaptation research focuses on immigrants' experience adapting into the host culture. In light of the growing globalization of world economy and the fact that more companies are setting up branches around the world, we would like to address the issue of cultural adaptation for employees in a multicultural organization. Samsung-Tijuana Park is the site for a Korean electronic company and its manufacture site in the U.S.-Mexican border city of Tijuana. One the one hand, Koreans move to Mexico and face a real sense of cultural adaptation into the host culture. On the other, local Mexican employees also need to adapt to the Korean organization culture. Through a search in previous literature on culture adaptation, we determined four factors about the individual's conditions: preparation, expectation, communication skills, and time in contact with the second culture. Many adaptation models use stages to represent the process, therefore, we summarized four states: anticipation, peak, valley, and smooth. We treated these eight concepts as variables and focused our study on finding possible correlations among them. Results show a general tendency for positive factors such as preparation and communication abilities to be positively correlated to positive states of adaptation such as peak and smooth. Consequently, there is a negative correlation between these positive factors and the valley state, which is the most obvious negative state. The similar patterns of correlation for both the Korean and Mexican cultural groups suggest that adaptation takes place when both parties are involved in the effort. We use the term "co-acculturation." Limitations and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]