PLEASE USE THE COMMENTS BELOW TO REVISE THE DISCUSSION :
You correctly identified and emphasized the important relationship between trust, honesty, and effective communication.
Please note the following:
Your recommendations on building and enhancing trust in individual relationships should reflect the central role of the leadership in establishing a positive environment to facilitate collaboration, productivity, and innovation.
Please note:
While the narrative provided by Dwight relating to the incident and relationship between Sally Hill and Jessie, her new supervisor, is crucial in the case scenario, we should also focus on the final paragraph to get a fuller picture (context) of the trust problems in the team and the role of the organizational leadership.
The following comments are very important:
Only a week after Dwight began to investigate Sally’s unhappiness did things come to a head in the department. Jessie had a team meeting to address the reasons why production rates had dropped. He talked for a half-hour. He asked for people’s opinions and no one would reply. One person asked permission to speak but asked only if the study would take much longer. Finally, Jessie dismissed the team. Jessie did not understand that when he first arrived everyone was happy and helpful. Had he not always been straight with them? Why was everyone so unhappy now? Jessie finally saw that he had a problem but was not quite sure what it was.
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The overall organizational culture is indispensable in building and maintaining a positive environment.
Enhancing the final draft of your presentation:
1. Resolving the problems in the production department:
A. Focus on the role of emotional intelligence in influencing the behavior of leaders and managers.
B. Equally important is the primary role of the company’s leadership to develop and maintain an organizational culture to facilitate trust, effective communication, and collaboration.
2. Focus on the role of the organizational leadership, rather than simply the problems or challenges in the production department — between Jessie and his team.
A. The work environment in the production department—the relationship between Jessie and the production team—should not be addressed in isolation from the overall organizational culture.
As I stressed last week, the leadership of the company is responsible for the following:
● Articulating the mission, values, and strategic objectives of the company.
● Establishing the organizational culture and a positive environment to facilitate collaboration, the development of the company’s core capabilities and capacity to enhance its competitiveness.
● Ensuring that the company’s strategic objectives are consistent with its values, mission, and organizational culture.
Recommendation One:
Address the following:
● Rather than Jessie, the leadership of the company has the primary responsibility of building trust and enhancing communication in the company.
Jessie is accountable to the leadership.
● There are indications of a decentralized decision-making structure in the company where important decisions were made by Jessie, possibly, without the knowledge and consent of the leadership.
● Did the overall organizational culture allow Jessie to create a hostile environment in the production department?
Therefore, why (how) did it allow Jessie, through his role as production manager, to create an environment that is detrimental to the culture and values of the company?
Recommendation Two:
How can the company and the production department achieve the following?
● Developing a corporate culture to support cooperative relationships in the organization?
● Establish the requisite interpersonal and informal relationships to facilitate effective communication, collaboration, increased productivity, and competitiveness?
Before discussing some of the specific steps by Jessie to restore/build trust and achieve effective communication, consider the following:
Emotional intelligence affects the behavior and mindset of leaders and managers:
These principles can be taught and developed.
The main principles of emotional intelligence include the following:
Therefore, unless Jessie possesses, or can learn and develop, these principles, his efforts to initiate discussions with his team aimed at restoring/building trust are likely to fail.
● Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and how they affect your life and work.
Social awareness relates to the practice of empathy – the ability to relate to others, “sense their emotions and understand their perspectives.
Self-confidence, the ability to assess your strengths and limitations, is also an important component of this category.
Leaders with a high level of emotional intelligence are able (learn) to trust their “gut feelings” and they understand that their emotional intelligence can provide useful information relative to difficult decisions.
Trustworthiness, conscientiousness, and adaptability are also important components of this category.
Self-management relates to the ability to control disruptive, unproductive and harmful emotions and decisions.
Leaders can learn to manage their emotions and impulses. It is important for leaders to strike the right emotional balance so that anger, fear and anxiety do not adversely affect their judgments and decisions.
1. Please enhance your discussion relating to the requisite skills for building culturally diverse teams.
Part One:
1. Identifying the steps that should be taken by team members to make the virtual experience work.
● The importance of cultural sensitivity or awareness:
What are the specific variables affecting effective communication?
For example, what are the specific variables affecting the establishment (development) of trust and motivation?
● Why is there a communication problem relating to time?
Due to time differences between the United States, South Korea, and Japan, establish specific policies relating to communication among cross-cultural team members.
● Improving participation and collaboration from Asian team members:
Cultural awareness: Understand how high context cultures such as those in Asia function.
Explicit expressions are uncommon.
Recommendations:
Asian Members: You are the leaders, tell us what to do.
American Members: We expect your input and participation.
● Provide detail (specific) information relating to procedures, duties and responsibilities.
● Facilitate cross-cultural training programs and employees’ exchange programs.
Virtual Business: How is culture affecting the Internet and E-commerce?
● Assess the opportunities and challenges?
●Assess the flow of information.
● Avoid the assumption (universal) that the Internet is dominated by the United States and the use of the English language.
● Recognize important differences in languages and culture—particularly relating to emerging and developing economies.
● Develop a multi-local strategy recognizing that people still respond based on their language and culture.
● Challenges of obtaining feedback: In contrast to face-face communication, there are new challenges in obtaining important feedback though a virtual business.
Establish cross-cultural training programs:
Composition of Teams:
Facilitate the hiring and use of Asian employees (team facilitators) with knowledge of Western management practices
Establish well-articulated procedures to obtain critical feedback from cross-cultural teams.
Part Two:
Scenario two should explain to Dwight how to set up a successful team, establish trust in a culturally diverse environment. In the discussion of the Asian teams, research the cultural differences in creating trust relationships between Americans and the Japanese and South Koreans.
Cultural Sensitivity and Awareness:
● Understanding the nature and dimension (variables) of a specific culture and how they affect the business and economic environment.
● They affect how companies develop appropriate strategies and policies relating to the specific national market.
● Culture is the main contributing factor in explaining the differences between domestic leadership and global leadership.
● Different cultural beliefs and values generate different sets of assumption regarding the nature of work, the workplace, authority, and leadership.
● Cultural differences play a critical role in determining why human resource management policies tend to have varying effects in different countries.
Establishing Inter-cultural Teams: Challenges of Managing Across Cultures:
Consider the following:
● The importance of cultural sensitivity (awareness). Cultural awareness should constitute a major focus of the environmental scanning of the national market.
● Recognize the importance of communication: Communication is the critical factor in cross-cultural management, inter-personal management, leadership, group interaction and collaboration.
● Knowledge of communication noise: Identify and assess the cultural variables that could cause communication “noise” or barriers in the communication process.
These variables include values, language, time, roles, social organization, attitudes, attribution and context.
Values and Trust: Building trust is dependent on the values of a country and there are wide variations.
In Asian cultures, trust is based (developed) on longstanding personal relationships.
The assumption, or expectation, is that a leader or manager should articulate and specify what should be done: specify the division of labor and specific functions.
Attitudes: Ethnocentrism and stereotypes could have a negative impact on effective communication.
Context: Communication context affects the meaning and interpretation of the communication process.
There are high and low context cultures:
In high context cultures, such as those in Asia, feelings and thoughts are not expressly expressed. They are implied (or embedded) in the communication process.
In contrast, in low context cultures such as the United States, feelings and thoughts are explicitly expressed.
DISCUSSIONScenario 1
The trust issues in this scenario are Jessie’s lack of trust in his subordinates to do the right thing. At the same time, employees are too afraid to trust their manager, Jessie, that he has the company’s best interest and the employees at heart. These issues were brought about by Jessie’s lack of a clear line of communication and honesty with his subordinates. Trust is built around honesty. Essentially, one can only be able to trust another party when there is some level of honesty from another party. Therefore Jessie should have been honest with sally on the study issue and lied to her. Second, a transparent chain of communication would have saved a lot of drama had sally heard it from her boss himself instead of side talks. This undermined sally’s faith in Jessie’s respect for her. To correct the issue, Jessie should begin by being honest with sally informing her of why he thinks automation is the way to go. This will give her ample time to job hunt in readiness for retrenchment. Jessie should further provide proactive leadership by being there for his subordinates’ needs and abandoning the know-it attitude by giving his associates an open ear to their grievances as opposed to having it as a formality. These will positively impact company productivity (Mc Gregor, n.d.).
Scenario 2
In building a new successful team, Dwight needs to hire the topmost professional with whom together they will work to formulate visions and conduct in the group while ensuring the best individuals are absorbed into the new team. Cultural diversity, if well managed, can be beneficial to the company. With the inclusion of Japanese and Korean groups, Dwight needs first to understand the diversities in the workplace, setting and sticking to laid out norms on the teams’ operations, and lastly, speedy unbias conflict resolution among team members. Respect and impartiality among existing groups could enhance trust within the units.
Based on different cultures in a diverse work environment, there needs to be an understanding of the different cultural orientations to avoid stereotyping against one unfamiliar side. In virtual meetings, geographical dispersion of staff members may jeopardize the company’s culture leading to conflicts and disagreements, which could undermine a company’s success since staff dp not get to be on one page as a team. There exist several cultural differences between the US, Japan, and Korea. The notable ones are punctuality in Korea and Japan, collectivism in japan and Korea compared to individualism in the US, and respect for authority in japan and Korea compared to US freedom of speech. Dwight should therefore create a balance between cultural differences for team success (“Cultural Differences Between the USA and Japan”, n.d.).
Scenario 3
The EC team is diverse; hence, there needs to be a balance to ensure coexistence and success in the teams. There should be ground rules of engagement in virtual experiences, with call-ins and video calls prioritized to enable team building and engagement. Further time management should be prioritized to ensure no ethnic group is ke[pt waiting for more extended hours because some members are late. Lastly, the needs to be a framework to ensure the freedom of speech by American individuals are not overexploited (“Cultural Differences Between the USA and Japan”, n.d.).
References
Cultural Differences Between the USA and Japan. Kokusai Express Japan. Retrieved 1 April 2022, from https://ksemoving.com/cultural-differences-usa-japan/.
Mc Gregor, K. Employee Engagement & Retention | Build Trust With Your Direct Reports. People Element | Employee Engagement & Experience Solutions. Retrieved 1 April 2022, from https://peopleelement.com/build-trust-with-direct-reports/.
