Situation 2. Answer the questions

Answer the questions

Situation 1

You have been posted overseas with a nonprofit foreign aid or­ganization. Your area of expertise is environmental cleanup, and the country in which you work is trying to recover from decades of abusing its natural resources, especially water. You are in charge of setting up a demonstration water-filtering plant in a certain district, but you are encountering strong resistance from the district supervisor. He wants to know if this technique has been tried anywhere else in his country, and when you say no, he asks why he should let you "experiment at [his] expense."

You point out that it's very important to see if this tech­nique will work in his country. If it doesn't, then how much better it will be to know that now before going ahead and in­stalling these plants in every district. He will be a hero for spon­soring this trial.

He says he will lose his job if this high-profile experiment fails and asks you why you can't know ahead of time if the plant is going to work. If you're not sure it's going to work, then you should spend more time perfecting the technology. "When the technology is perfect, then you can try it out in my district," he says. What do you do?

1. Why do you think your supervisor behave this way?

2. Would you continue conduction of the experiment or prefer to stop?

3. What do you think about the improvement of the technology before starting the experiment?

4. What culture – high or low power distant – would you prefer to live and work, if you had choice? Why?

You are a team leader in the technical support division of a company working with new species of plant in a low power distance culture. Your company is famous for its informal and flat organizational culture: there are few layers of management and your engineers work for the most part on their own, only coming to you when they have a problem or a question. Your company has recently entered into an agreement with an offshore partner (in a high power distance culture) to provide you with software program­mers for one of your important projects. These programmers will be with you for an eighteen-month period, and now, after the arrival of the first group, there are some problems.

The programmers do not seem willing or able to work with­out very close supervision and, in fact, seem unwilling to take responsibility for their work. They expect you to make even the most routine decisions, and they always check with you before undertaking even moderately important tasks. In dealing with internal clients (divisions that you and these foreign program­mers are developing software for), they always defer to you and do not give these clients answers to their questions or responses to their requests on the spot, although it is well within their job description to do so. All this means you're having to spend a lotmore time with these people than you should, so much that you have almost no time for your other employees. What should you do?

Дата добавления: 2014-12-29