· Envision you are promoted to be the head of the HR department with subsidiaries in China, India and Germany. Feel free to consider the realistic conditions of your previous employer; alternatively, create an imaginative scenario. In any case, please briefly describe the underlying conditions in your introduction.
For your future role you are tasked to produce an internal report to your management in which they ask you to describe your employees involvement strategy. The management wants to make sure that team work, motivation, involvement and work performance is very high across all the locations. Please clearly identify which opportunities can arise from that, but also which challenges do you associate with working across the involved cultures. Please do provide related context information in the introduction.
In particular, you want to address relevant issues around leading/managing people in those countries, if you can see clear preferences for certain communication styles, are those associated with cultural patterns (of all underlying cultures), and if so, do those advance or hinder the unfolding of good cooperation within these dispersed cross-cultural teams? How do you envision communication taking place (face-to-face or virtually, and which issues do you associate with those to formats? And, based on your own work environment, can you make practically specific and relevant suggestions that you consider would help the future cooperation? If possible, please do include the perspectives of the other cultures, as this will be important in order for you to create a more balanced understanding of the underlying case.
Following the seniority of your position and the target audience – the management of your company – you are required to academically substantiate your proposed considerations and solutions. Please do include academic and non-academic sources that can advance your case. In any case, do use proper referencing. While you can choose which referencing style you follow, you are encouraged to employ ONLY one referencing style, and, hence, need to make sure that you fit all references into that one style.
Your written document shall be approx. 3,000 words (+ 10 %), and can be organized along the following structure (this is only a suggestion; feel free to choose your own structure):
Executive Summary (not included in the word count)
Table of Content (not included in the word count)
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical exploration of potential opportunities/challenges (draw from literature, i. e. Bennett, Hofstede, Trompenaars, Hall, etc.)
3. Discuss how the previously discussed opportunities/challenges fit into your underlying practically relevant scenario. Do you see any confirmation of literature, or any contradictions?
4. Conclusion
5. Recommendation
6. References
7. Appendix
You will be assessed along the following criteria:
Along structural requirements of senior management report, such as the above mentioned structure. Along formality requirements such as the ‘look and feel’ of your work with attention to detail in form of page numbers, chapter/headline numbering, ‘breathing space’ of the page, length of paragraphs (max 10 lines), referencing format, and stringent application of chosen formats such as line spacing between chapters and subheadlines. Along quality requirements, such as the relevance of your executive summary, your Table of Content, your Introduction, your literature review with sufficient references, the quality of the application to the content and formatting requirements of the Harvard Referencing System, your ability to display critical thinking and reflection in your submitted work, the quality of the discussion, your ability to conclude and the depth and relevance of suggested recommendations. Finally, you are also assessed along your ability to fit everything into a word count of 3,000 – 3,300 words.