| Abstract [eng] |
International business became a phenomenon of the civilisation at the end of the 20th century, without it none of the bigger companies both abroad and in Lithuania can imagine their business. Successful participation in international market can provide excellent opportunities to take advantage of all the advantages thereof: larger market for the production and services, new ideas, better quality of life, smaller capital and labour output, qualified human resources. On the other hand, it encourages undertaking also bigger risk of investments, high level competitiveness and etc. Both national and international business faces smaller or bigger drawbacks. That is quite simple and obvious: smaller companies have smaller problems, bigger companies have bigger problems. One of the main and most important problems, having significant influence on the capacity of work comes from conflicts. Despite the reality, conflicts constitute an inseparable part of the company; therefore, the attitude towards conflicts is very important: how the company reacts to them, what conflict solving solutions are selected, what attempts are made to avoid conflict situations. Therefore, to have successful business, it must be understood, that the possibilities of the conflict to develop are directly related to the ability of solving it and managing conflict situations. Nevertheless, that is not an easy task, it is especially difficult to control conflicts in international companies, where culture differences, language barriers are faced, one or several values are understood differently, different stereotypes prevail, the problem of different motivation arises and so on. In the literature of both Lithuanian and foreign authors conflicts and their management are analysed, but it is very difficult to find theory or researches analysing international conflicts. International conflicts belong to the field which is rarely analysed, even though today this issue is very relevant, since the local market becomes too small and businessmen have to expand into “international waters”. Nevertheless, it is not enough to choose a country, which impresses your business and perform a thorough analysis of the market. It is necessary to get well acquainted with the culture, traditions and beliefs of that country. As well as understanding the characteristics of communication in that country, attitude towards work, time allocations, manners, humour. The latter factors, which are rarely thought of, have negative influence upon the activity of the company, decrease the efficiency of work and cause conflicts. The initiator of analysing the culture differences, who performed one of the widest and most exhaustive works in the intercultural field, was Dutch sociologist of culture and business field G. Hofstede, who formulated five dimensions. Based on these five dimensions the cultural characteristics of Lithuania are determined and in accordance with culture classification model of G. Hofstede the questionnaire research methodology was created, with the help of which international companies as well as the causes influencing conflicts were analysed. |
