You work for LL Company, which manufacturers high-end optical scopes for hunting

Question

You work for LL Company, which manufacturers high-end optical scopes for hunting rifles. LL Company has been the market leader for the past 20 years and has decided to diversify by applying its technology to develop a top- quality binocular. You have been named project manager for this undertaking. In an essay of two pages or more, briefly describe some sociocultural issues that might slow the project's progress. Relevant sociocultural concerns include problems with leadership, problem solving, teamwork, negotiation, politics, and customer expectations. Briefly articulate ways uou can address those issues.

Explanation / Answer

I would like to explain the Sociocultural concerns, problem-solving, leadership, teamwork, Negotiation and customer expectations from the management perspective as shown below:

Socio-Cultural Issues and overcoming the challenges:

Promoting a diverse workforce for Business to succeed:

Workplace Diversity refers to an inclusive environment at work locations where employees, operations members, project members, suppliers, vendors, customers etc., who are the key stakeholders of the business are not discriminated with the background of one's culture, race, skin color, physical appearance etc.,

Organizational cross culture is a function of values, norms, belief and various different assumptions that group of people follows in an organization. These shared norms possess a great deal of influence over the people in an organization and this governs various aspects like dressing, responding, behaving, job performance, following some systematic guidelines etc., Each individual in the team will have different norms and values for themselves. Some of those to understand the team culture are,

My thoughts in accepting and incorporating differences in a cross-cultural & diversified workplace:

The issues fundamentally appear in situations where one fails to see other in their perspectives. For example, in a situation where the manager of India and China doesn’t seem to be in sync with each other’s opinion. Each of them does not seem to understand other person's cultural values, norms, and behaviors. Some of the team strategies that overcome the Cultural issues, diversity issues and stereotypic behaviors are as follows:

By developing the team through this 3-way process of Mapping, Bridging and Integrating, teams shall start functioning without any diversity issues that arise due to culture, geographical location etc., and also sometimes without the dependence of the local manager within the region as they will be equipped to work along with the multicultural diversified staff.

To improve organization's climate for diversity:

In order to improve the climate for diversity, Business shall focus on Affirmative Action and cultural changes in the organization when it comes to diversity. An affirmative action is an act that favors people who tend to be affected by discrimination or unfairness. Its policies are those in which an institution who engage in an effort to improve opportunities for traditionally expelled groups in America. The focus is always towards education & employment. From the perspective of higher education, affirmative action refers to admission policy where they provide equal opportunity to access education for the people who were historically underrepresented for women and minorities.

It allows diversity is in place. Supports deprived persons with advancing. Acts as a boost to underprivileged students as it secures equality for all races.  It breaks color oriented discrimination and encourages hard work and study. It is really required to recompense minorities due to several decades of slavery. It allows students of minority community enroll for higher education. It encourages equality at work locations and social places…

To analyze the features of leaders and analyze the same:

I would like to pick up two major types of leadership categories viz., Charismatic leadership.

Charismatic Leadership:

Charismatic leadership engrosses a sense of confidence, approach, and elegance. The qualities of Charismatic leaders are tough to be narrowed down. However, they attract the followers and be the inspirations for people to action them. Highly Charismatic leaders are often referred as Transformational leaders as they are capable of sustaining significant changes in the organization. Some of the key features of charismatic leadership are,

Extraordinary Communication skills – both one on one and team meetings

Sense of Maturity – sense of wisdom and knowledge

Why Firms are interested to make changes and to describe some of the changes:

In general, changes never happen on its own. There are various forces that stimulate change. Determine the forces of change as shown below. In the current business situations, changes are inevitable due to varying business landscape, top management priorities, Technological advancements, Cultural and Strategic shift of the organization, Change in goals and objectives etc., there exist some strong focus for all these changes. Let us see them briefly.

1.       Nature of the workforce - People who are from diversified culture, aging of the population and new entrants with insufficient skills to deliver what is expected in their work etc.,

2.       Technology - Technological change examples viz., Faster, Cheaper and better devices, cloud computing etc.,

3.       Economical shocks - Increase and decrease of dot-com stocks, decreased interest rates, and turbulent financial Markets.

4.       Competition - Local and global competitors, Mergers and acquisitions, increasing growth of e-commerce functions

5.       Societal trends - Changes in Internet chat rooms, Retirement of baby boomers and increase of discount and 'big box' retailers.

6.       World politics - Changes in global financial crisis, the opening of markets in countries like China and India, extreme weather conditions due to global climate, Change in the government.

I would like to choose an organization to which I worked before where there is a desperate need for cultural change. Learning organizations transcend political boundaries and organizational cultures in multiple different ways.

For example, a start-up organization will go through different complex situations in their business as setting up Operations that is responsible for customer deliverables is the most important requirement for any business.

When that is initiated, other aspects pertaining to people, availability of raw materials from suppliers, processing procedures, availability of standard operating procedures, guidelines, quality standards, checks and balances for the accuracy model, sales & marketing, customer-facing teams etc., need to be an integral part of the core functions that looks after each other in various different modes for their individual deliverables.

There will be several political barriers that a new organization needs to go through while they set up their system. For Example, A knowledgeable resource without good communication skills suffers from burn out situations where someone else presents the ideas of the former to get credits. The political situation starts from here.

Like this, there are several examples where organizations fail to learn from their mistakes and come up with a lot of preventative measures. Cultural barriers is another drawback for a learning organization (if it is globally located) cultural differences of employees located in different locations becomes a hindrance to delivering better performance & productivity. Learning organizations can overcome this only by means of recording the lessons learned and taking corrective and preventive actions during the course of their stabilization.

Various Stages of the group and to analyze each stage:

Stages of groups can be best understood using Tuckman’s 5 stage model of team formation are Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning. Features of these stages are as follows:

·        Forming – A new team is formed where the team members introduce themselves to each other. Some of them are anxious as they don’t know each other etc.,

·        Storming – Storming is the next stage of forming where the team pushes against the boundaries that were established in the Forming stage. This is the stage where there are a lot of conflicts exist between the team members.

·        Norming – Norming is the stage where people start to complement the differences, agree to disagree, appreciate each other’s strength and works as per the direction of the leader.

·        Performing – Everyone works hard to achieve the team’s objectives without conflicts and friction

·        Adjourning – Projects are a short-term Endeavour where the team adjourns and team members will get into new teams with new people.

Organizational Culture and its Influences:

Any organization when going through a lot of changes is likely to witness various cultural impacts. It is imperative for an organization to equip themselves with appropriate business with tools, techniques, and methods for transforming them rapidly, consistently with an influential output.

These Kotter's 8 step process is designed to help and support organizations develop the mindset and expertise required successfully overcoming and leading the change.

These 8 steps are,

Negotiation:

Recommendations for cross-cultural communication and negotiations:

Following Business factors need to be considered when doing business internationally that includes both cross-cultural communication and negotiations:

1. The environment where we negotiate

2. Differences we find in both cultural and intracultural situations

3. Differences in Ideology

4. Bureaucracy in Foreign company

5. Government rules and legal regulations of the foreign economy

6. International Monetary Factors covering Financial Insecurity

7. Economic, Social and Political Changes across the world

Cross-Cultural Communications include the difficulties of language, cultural and language barrier, physical cues, learning the cultural aspect of the foreign country, assumptions and limitations, clarification and rechecking, avoid fancy language and speak slow and clear by enunciation and keep it simple. Illustrate the decision-making process and ask the foreign partners for clarification, give importance to gender dynamics, follow professionalism.

Four cultural areas that will cause differences in the negotiation strategies that Chinese partners use.

1. When it comes to attending meetings, Americans would always prefer prior appointments and schedule. For Chinese, most of the times prior notice is not required.

2. For an American, there is a direct correlation between stuff that is urgent and the time. Any important things require immediate attention & action. This is quite opposite in China where important stuff requires more time for reflection.

3. When it comes to negotiation, Americans are preoccupied with the articles in a negotiation while Chinese focus on the relationship between them and their opponents.

4. In Chinese society, being silent and remain quiet is treated as maturity. However, for an American being quiet means one knows nothing.

Techniques to overcome these differences so they do not affect the success or failure of business negotiations:

1. Creating Mutual Trust – Chinese believe the long-term relationship cannot be maintained without mutual trust. However, Westerners believe in drawing the line between business and the personal relationships. In Business situations with Chinese, an American must consider establishing trust.

2. Identification of the Decision Makers – Westerners consults his superior before making a decision which is not the case with Chinese.

3. Overcome the Language Barrier – While American speaks US English, Mandarin is the official language in China. One must consider understanding the body language of the negotiator than depending upon the translator completely.

Strengths and weaknesses of American negotiators:

Strengths – Americans believe everything is negotiable, they never pay in window sticker price, they start slowly and be patient, they make small concessions especially at the end, they watch out for creative alternatives

Weakness – Americans lack the ability to tolerate interruptions, while other Asian nations prefer to exchange ideas first, American’s prefer to go item by item.

These strengths and weakness certainly play an instrumental role in the success and failure of the negotiation process. When an American try and understands the Chinese culture before the negotiation process, he/she is almost into the minds of their Chinese partners. When they respond to them in their own language (here language is not the literal meaning) when it comes to following some of the behavioral traits explained earlier, the communication is seamless even without knowing the local language. In the aspect of communication, 90% of the information is passed through non-verbal cues and in informal modes. Hence these are quite significant when it comes to decision making and negotiations.

The approach of Westerners and Asians to complex negotiation tasks:

Due to the advancement in Internationalization, Globalization & Liberalization policies of almost all the nations, International Business is at its peak and the advantage of information technology and e-commerce continue to dominate the ever-changing economic climate of many countries. When it comes to such complex trading process, negotiations play a very critical role. Here the negotiation does not just rely on effective communication between two countries it also depends on non-conflicting collaboration at the economic entity. In the process of negotiation, the person who is negotiating - his/her idea and behavior are influenced by their own parent countries culture.

There are huge differences in the outline of belief, group behaviors, views about value creation, style of negotiation, being conscious about the situation in demand, related benefits etc., between both western and Asian cultures.

The pattern of thoughts: The eastern culture stresses upon the judgment and it is adapted to purpose from shared to the precise decision. However, western culture stresses orientation and it is habituated to purpose from precise to shared, i.e. discovering mutual indispensable of the identical class of thing from the features of many detailed things.

Views about Value generation: This is a significant component of culture that regulates human behavior socially and intellectually. In the sense of business and its purpose, western utilizes the view of their values of similarities and stresses the rationale behind law and justice which is absolutely different from the Chinese culture where the strategy is never win-win. For the trading relations, US personals treat the person who bargains as just people with the same status while it is the other way with Asians.

Group Behaviors: This is related to specific criteria, trust, integrity, and value integrated by common people in a group and it tells the similar attitude among the members of the group. The person who does business in Eastern countries have better group awareness, however, the negotiants in western culture tend to focus on awareness of the individual. Like Japan focuses on group awareness who is eastern and the Americans who are individual focused are from western.

Style of Negotiation: This means negotiants’ primary patience and characters of their style is represented. This has very focused cultural boundaries associated. It also relates to ethical values and the behavior of the individual during the various stages of negotiation which is associated with their cultural values and the nationality they belong to. For example, Western people project high level of certainty, influential, demonstrative and sensible style. Germans are good at Business Management, however, they lack negotiation styles. British are extremely confident that they don’t apologize or feel sorry for anything they did wrong. Northern Europeans are very calm and good at negotiations. Gulf nationalists have open door policy and they focus on networking and establishing friendly relationships etc., but they are not good at time management. In contrast Japanese are very time conscious seldom they appear to be selective, and they have feeble manifestation and gain kindness from the negotiants and they bring them under the control of their side.

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