Corporation Problem Solving by Hoftede's Cultural Dimensions

Executive Summary

Due to different cultural backgrounds and distinct personalities, conflicts in a team with intercultural workforces are inevitable, which probably lead to workplace inefficiency or project failure. This report was prepared by me for alleviating workplace conflicts in Bovis Lend Lease which will refer to Hoftede's cultural dimensions - Individualism-collectivism, Power Distance and Masculinity and Costa and McCrae's personality dimension - Consciousness to address verbal and non-verbal communication and relationship conflicts in this group. Then, three solutions - Collaborative Dialogue, Communication Adaptability and Face to Face Communication and a series of recommendations are suggested to deal with these problems for improving mutual understanding, active participation, job responsibility and relationships between members and the leader's communication competences and leadership.

Recommendations

 Professional training courses on effective communication and staff management should be taken by Marco.

 All members' cultures and main theories on solving workplace conflicts should be studied in the form of lectures to prompt members' communication adaptability.

 Organization rules and regulations should be established to regulate employees' behaviors.

1. Identifying the problem

Currently, an increasing number of mega-institutions around the world encompass multicultural workforces, due to the ever-accelerating globalization. Businesses in Australia are more likely to witness this tendency, because its better living conditions and the relatively looser Australian immigration policy have attracted millions of overseas people moving here. These expatriates with different cultural contexts, largely professionals in such certain areas as business, engineering, and technological research, usually need to participate in team projects in future work. Due to significantly varied cultural backgrounds, different ways of thinking, as well as diverse personalities, good communications and cooperation between team members are rather difficult, which probably leads to poor teamwork and working inefficiencies.

In this case，a 5-member group, Marco, the team leader, Tomoko, Brad, Hamid, Jose, from different countries is working in a transport advisory body in Bovis Lend Lease, which is one of the world's leading project management and construction companies, cooperating to create a appropriate solution to improve and integrate public transport system for their city. However, they seem to be in conflict with each other due totheir significant cultural differences and distinct personalities, which leads their project to hardly make any big progress.

The paramount issue facing this team is verbal interruption. In the group, Marco, an Australian but born in Italy, and Brad from America really enjoy talking, but sometimes they are considered talking too much, even interrupting others. Marco tends to share opinions with his superiors, but he has some problems in expressing himself clearly, so his conversation often makes others confused. Brad never worked in this field, but is quite confident in expressing himself. However, his words are often unable to be appreciated by other members including Marco.

The second major issue is none-verbal misunderstanding. Tomoko, from Japan is experienced in dealing with transport problems, after years of working in a local government, but rarely expresses her own opinions. While Marco hopes every teammate actively and equally joins discussions, and speaks out their views, so he thinks it difficult to communicate with Tomoko. Instead, Tomoko often offers to serve others such as making tea, but Marco refused her offers and said he can do it on his own. Tomoko was apparently smiling but actually embarrassed. She thought she might make some mistakes to dissatisfy Marco and then felt frustrated.

Another primary issue is estrangement between members. For instance, Hamid, from Saudi Arabia has years of working experience in a governmental department. He once failed to finish his primary duty assigned by Marco, giving Marco a bad impression of lacking the concept of time and responsibility. He is accustomed to answering his female colleague Tomoko without any eye contact but always looking at Marco, making Tomoko unhappy. Jose from Brazil, cannot tolerate Hamid, because he thinks Hamid is rude, and does not respect others even Marco, the superior. Hamid feel all others unfriendly to him, so he intends to leave the group.

Through analyzing the members' conflicts and each other's opinions, several apparent causes are obtained. The first cause lies in insufficient cultural mutual understanding and respect. Another cause is limited communication competences. Next comes a deficiency of working responsibility. However, the further clarification of conflicts in this group must be explored in depth in the following chapters.

2. Theoretical background

Everyday conflicts in intercultural workplaces are often traced to cultural miscommunication or ignorance (Ting-Toomey, 1999). Hofstede conducted the comparatively comprehensive study on intercultural conflict management in the workplace. He (1994) developed a model that identifies four primary dimensions to differentiate cultures such as individual-collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity, and later added long-term and short-term orientation in 1996. Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann (1974) identified five main styles that people tend towards to address conflicts. Apart from the culture-lever research, some scholars study personality dimensions contributing to conflicts. Among the personality factor research, the most representative is Costa and McCrae (1992)'s "Five Factor Model" or FFM involving Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. This part will examine some main theories of these researchers which will be used in the following chapters.

Firstly, Individualism-collectivism theory (Hofstede, 1981) will be applied to analyze the first issue- verbal interruption. Individualism stresses individual identity through the strong assertion of personal opinions, and the explicit expression of personal emotions, and the pursuit of personal achievements. In individualist societies such as Christian based Australia and America, people make decisions generally through inter-arguments and negations. Kenneth and Ralph (1974) regard them as the competitive style of dealing with conflicts. Individuals with this style hold a firm position to the issue, and figure what they desire, so problems