BUSI 682 Week 1 Group DB Forum 1: Parts 1 and 2 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Parts 1 and 2 (Topic and Thread)

BUSI 682 Global Project Management, Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Parts 1 and 2 (topic reservation and thread)

Thread by [Student Name]

The reserved case and its company are composites standing in for the course's own project management case; the textbook and research cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 682.

Part 1: Topic Reservation

I am reserving the case of the sterile-packaging line start-up in Vietnam for my thread.

Part 2: Thread

In the case, a composite U.S. maker of medical supplies outsources sterile packaging to a contract manufacturer outside Ho Chi Minh City. Its best quality engineer, Laura, learns on a Friday that she will lead the line's start-up and flies out on Monday. She knows validation protocols thoroughly but has never managed a project or worked abroad. In weekly meetings, the plant's managers agree to every milestone; the validation runs nonetheless miss their dates, and the line starts eight weeks late. The case ends with her manager concluding that the supplier "does not take deadlines seriously." I would argue that the delay began in the company's own office, when it treated a global leadership role as an engineering assignment.

Moran and Youngdahl (2008) open their book with the accidental project manager, the specialist handed a global project because of technical skill or availability, and they argue that leading across cultures requires skills such a person has rarely been given. Laura fits the description. Nothing in the case suggests anyone prepared her to read a meeting in which a junior manager would not contradict a senior visitor in front of colleagues, or to ask questions that would surface problems indirectly. The company sent its best engineer and gave her no map.

Her manager's conclusion is also too easy. Taras et al. (2010) meta-analyzed 598 studies covering more than 200,000 people and found that Hofstede's cultural value dimensions did predict organizationally relevant outcomes, with stronger effects in culturally tight countries than in loose ones. National culture matters, then, but it does not license the claim that a whole supplier does not care about deadlines. The textbook's point that culture is learned and complex points the same way: the plant's managers were responding to a situation, including a client who never asked how the work was going.

The more useful question is what the company could have developed in Laura. Ang et al. (2007) defined cultural intelligence across four dimensions, metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioral, and found across several samples that these dimensions predicted cultural judgment and decision making, adaptation and task performance in culturally diverse settings. Cultural intelligence can be assessed and built, which means the company had options other than luck.

For its next international start-up, I would recommend three changes: select leaders partly on cultural intelligence as well as technical skill, give them at least two weeks of preparation that includes time with someone who has worked with the supplier, and pair them with a local liaison who can explain what agreement in a meeting does and does not mean. Has anyone in our group been an accidental project manager, and what would have helped you most in your first month?

References

Ang, S., Van Dyne, L., Koh, C., Ng, K. Y., Templer, K. J., Tay, C., & Chandrasekar, N. A. (2007). Cultural intelligence: Its measurement and effects on cultural judgment and decision making, cultural adaptation and task performance. Management and Organization Review, 3(3), 335-371. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-8784.2007.00082.x

Moran, R. T., & Youngdahl, W. E. (2008). Leading global projects: For professional and accidental project leaders. Butterworth-Heinemann.

Taras, V., Kirkman, B. L., & Steel, P. (2010). Examining the impact of Culture's Consequences: A three-decade, multilevel, meta-analytic review of Hofstede's cultural value dimensions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(3), 405-439. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018938