Singapore is an immigrant country and have a very diversify culture with close to 35% of its population is non citizen residing in the country, (25% of is foreigner and 10% are permanent resident). Despite this high non-citizen to citizen ratio, the country are still promoting foreign talent and believing that the country will be in a shortage of labour if the immigrant policy were to stop. The population consist of more than 75% Chinese, follow by Malay and Indian; main religion is Buddhism, Islam, Christian, Taoism and Hinduism. Despite the rich Asian culture the country have, Singapore is also one of the most westernizes country within Asia. The recent growing China economy and its open door policy have landed Singapore with substantial foreign labour arrive from mainland China, this have created some cultural conflict among many Singaporean.
Singapore is famous for its hard working and competitive working cultures of ‘kiasu’. Traditional values of the Chinese have strong influence on the working culture, this converted to a culture high in power distance, and the lower level employee accepts the subordinate level and seldom question management decision. They also stressed on team works and maintaining group harmonies [Warnstam, 2007]. This has resulted in a very cooperative employee to employer relationship. The labour union in Singapore are usually in good term with the companies and the last open labour strike is more than 20 years ago on 1986.
3.4 Technology
The inventions of the computer, and subsequently Internet have prompt endless expansion of electronic and telecommunication innovation during the past decades. Recent development of high density (HD) video providing more crisp images, together with high speed computer processing speed to compress and decompress these images, and faster data transfer rate, resulted in high quality real time video conferencing with no time gap and clear sound and image. This had made video conferencing very attractive to companies as substitute for business travelling [Yu, 23 Jun 2009].
With technology advancement, the definition of entertainment has also been evolving. Electronic device are getting more and more portable with increased performance. These gadgets are also getting cheaper and more and more people are treating it as a necessity. Almost every household in Singapore will have a portable laptop, hand phone and digital cameras that are loaded with personalize music, game, photo and vid
