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In: Business and Management

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Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Takeema L. McCaskill
ETH/316
September 29, 2014
Christy Vilavanh

Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Known to be one of the leading international oil, gas, and energy companies, BP has a worldwide reputation of providing consumers fuel for transportation purposes, energy towards heat and light; in addition to, creating petrochemical products and lubricants to keep engines especially in large machineries moving. With headquarters based in London, England, the multinational organization currently have operations in more than 80 countries throughout the world; in fact, has currently 83,900 employees in the United States as well as internationally. BP having a multinational presence since the organization conducts business operations out of countries; such as, Indonesia, West Africa, and Slovak Republic its open to possibly facing cultural issues which can in fact make an impact on the internal operations of the organization, or influence business decisions that effects the organization and its stakeholders.

BP has experience more than one issue that could influence the interactions outside of the United States. In 2005 the Texas City Refinery explosion killed fifteen workers in which lead to the organization being fine by the OSHA, and the oil spill on Prudhoe Bay which happened in the Alaska North Slope back in 2006. However, one of the major environmental disasters that will go down in U.S. history is the Gulf Oil Spill of April, 2010. The Gulf of Mexico was paralyzed by an explosion to the oil rig off the coast of Louisiana in which injured seventeen people and killing eleven; in addition to, spewing at least 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The BP oil spill not only paralyzed the organization within the states, but the oil spill affected everyone globally. For instance, after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this damaged the tourism markets since the Gulf of Mexico included states such as, Louisiana and Florida; in fact, the Gulf oil spill of 2010 caused tourism to drop dramatically, and theses harboring states depend on tourism and fishing since its part of the culture. The organization identified the key points as to what caused the devastating oil spill back in April 2010, and set forth plans that would possibly prevent this issue from occurring again in the future.

For a globally functioning organization such as British Petroleum the organization focuses on being a company that upholds to a specific values and ethics in which will help with everyday decisions. BP believes that they inspire to be an organization surrounded by safety, the respect of others, courage, and being one team. In accordance with expressing what they believe in will reflect how they behave and what they inspire to be as an organization under their values. Since BP does operations globally they have created a ethics system in which will apply to all employees no matter what position they are in, whether it’s a officer, or stakeholders, and even though the organization have partners they don’t have overall control over-the overall code states they will in fact make sure that the partners of the organization follow similar principles set forth by BP. The organization have different ways to ensure everyone is in compliance with the codes and values set forth; for instance, according to the BP website, the organization works with independent parties such as, fuel retailers that sell BP branded fuel in different countries such as Turkey. In Turkey BP has created an anti-corruption training that strengthens the awareness of ethical culture and values among the employees as well as BP-branded fuel retailers. According to Richard Harding, the Fuels Value Chain Country Manager in Turkey stated “Sharing the training with our business partner’s reduces potential bribery and corruption risks for BP, and enables our partners to protect their business better” (“BP, 2014) According to Manias, Monroe, Till (2013), “because codes of ethics are written for a variety of different purposes, the content of the codes will vary widely as well. Each company will develop a code tailored to meet its own specific needs (p.519) BP ethical perspectives and the standards the company holds must be understood, reasonable, and believed by the different cultures involved with the business aspects of the organization. BP takes pride in the fact the organization is culture based and centered on being a diverse work environment. Also, BP believes in community engagement and grievances with the community surrounding their organization. In Indonesia, BP was planning the expansion of the Tangguh LNG project, but during planning the expansion the organization wanted to seek the views and feelings of the local community members. BP held a public consultation meeting in 62 villages and received feedback from more than 1,000 community members which views were taking into consideration during the planning process. Some of the village members were concerned about the route to a cultural heritage site would be blocked by the construction of the new jetty. Hearing the views and thoughts of village members, BP made plan changes by creating a alternative route to the heritage site; in fact, making it easier to access from their homes to the site. BP stands by building up an open dialogue with employees and stakeholders will in fact build strong and beneficial working relationships no matter what part of the world you are conducting business from. The operating managing system of BP requires the businesses outside of BP to have a process for receiving communication from stakeholders and need to document the responses.

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill of April 2010 provided awareness and possible solutions to prevent this major environment disaster from happening in the future to BP and other oil and energy organizations. Not only the oil spill raised health and environmental concerns, because marine life became impaired and wetlands were covered with spewing oil, but many jobs were affected by the oil spill and tourism numbers were down between states like Louisiana, Alabama Gulf Coast and Florida. How can a large organization like BP recover from a disaster such as an oil spill that will be acceptable by all stakeholders? First BP updated their safety and response capabilities by conducting an internal investigation to gain an understanding as to why the accident occurred in the first place. Currently, there are twenty six recommendations that will reduce the risk of BP drilling operations to ensure all safety measures are implanted in the Gulf of Mexico operations. After the accident, BP officials and commission investigators discovered that this accident could have been fully prevented if employees, management, and rig crew members communicated better and there were more knowledgeable people working internally in the company, down to the engineers. According to Rascoe (2011) It was said by the commission’s chief counsel, Fred Bartlit in a statement that “The sad fact is that this was an entirely preventable disaster, poor decisions by management were the real cause”. BP continues to participate in collaborative industry efforts to understand and share the lessons learned to prevent any other “accidents” from happening by having safer drilling practices. As of today, the organization conducted more than 200 briefings in 30 countries to exchange and collaborate on what they can do as a organization as a whole to make efforts with safer drilling practices and uphold the standards of BP and agreements under the EPA contracts.

BP organization understands the issue they faced which may have put a bad taste in the environmental community mouths; in addition to, may have hurt the reputation of the organization because of poor operation practices. Getting stakeholders globally involved with revising the organization codes and values helps build back up the reputation of the company, and it reflects in BP financial numbers. Today, BP still remains part of the Fortune Global 500 list of financial earnings in which numbers doubled from 2013 to 2014. Even though BP continues to struggle to deal with the damage of the 2010 oil spill, the company has worked to increase the safety of the employees and environment while grow in profit numbers ("Global 500 2014", 2014).

References
BP. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/our-people- and-values/ethics-and-compliance.html
Global 500 2014. (2014). Retrieved from http://fortune.com/global500/sinopec-group-3/
Manias, N., Monroe, D., & Till, J. E. (2013). Ethics Applied (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Learning Solutions.
Rascoe, A. (2011, February 17). Gulf Oil Spill Could Have Been Prevented By BP Workers Who Weren't Consulted. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/oil-spill-could-have-been_n_824647.html

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