Question

Analyze the following case and answer the questions:
A family-owned carbon steel company from Germany has extended its business to Hong Kong.
The owners bought a small traditional Chinese firm and decided to copy the successful
structure they had developed at home (in Germany). This structure was headed by three
general managers who equally shared the responsibilities for the business activities of the firm.
The consequences were as follows.
1 Now the Chinese employees were assigned tasks by people they have never seen before
and whom they did not understand. Many misunderstandings occurred, some were quite
costly.
2 The employees back in Europe were only concerned with whether the assigned tasks were
completed and did not consider any other obligations to the Chinese employees, such as
taking care of the relationships with the Chinese government, banks, etc.
3 Eventually, the local employees became frustrated and were ready to leave the company.
The result was that the management model was changed again and a single managing director
of the subsidiary was accountable for all business activities in Hong Kong.
Discussion Questions:

2 How does this situation compare to comparable situations in your home country Egypt ? What are
the limits of a cultural explanation?

Answer 1

How does this situation compare to comparable situations in your home country Egypt ? What are
the limits of a cultural explanation?

In my home country Egypt a similar situation occurred when we who were high on collectivism were associated with onshore team which were high on individualism. The difference here was that we were on the management side. This led to a lot of uncalled for repercussions as people onshore felt the nature of our management as too interfering and this led to a lot of conflicts while our management was having a tough time to realize that their involvement was being taken in a wrong manner. The solution that was later devised was that a lot many connection calls were done away with and a system of management by objectives was applied and imbibed.The limits of cultural explanations are related to the existence of economic explanations. The aspect to be noted here is that most situations are related to economic reasons and hence to clearly define when the public choices were related to cultural issues is hard to define.

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