BUSI 682 Week 2 Group DB Forum 1: Part 3 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Part 3 (Replies)

BUSI 682 Global Project Management, Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Part 3 (replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The two group members, their threads and the cases they analyzed are composites standing in for the course's own; the textbook and research cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 682.

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, you made a fair point that both the German and American engineers in your case value direct speech, so the team did not suffer from one side hinting while the other side missed the hint. But your conclusion that the team needed no cultural adjustment skips over language. The case says the team worked in English, which was a second language for every German member. Tenzer et al. (2014), interviewing members of multinational teams in three German automotive corporations, found that when colleagues struggled with the shared language, members reacted with feelings such as anxiety and frustration and drew conclusions about one another's competence and intentions, and both shaped whether trust formed. In your case, the Stuttgart lead stopped speaking in design reviews after the second month, and the Detroit engineers began routing decisions around him. Nothing in the case suggests his technical judgment had changed; the drawings he submitted in writing were still the most careful on the team. That pattern looks less like a clash of styles and more like trust eroding because one person was working harder to be understood. Moran and Youngdahl (2008) remind project leaders that understanding and communication are where culture becomes practical. Two direct cultures can still misread each other when only one of them is speaking its first language. Would sending design questions in writing before each review have kept the Stuttgart lead in the conversation?

Reply to Priya

Priya, your thread made a strong case that the Indian vendor in your case delivered code with too many defects, and the defect counts you cited were persuasive. I would question, though, the conclusion that the vendor alone caused the failure. Hinds et al. (2011) reviewed research on cross-national collaboration and argued for an intercultural lens on global work, one that looks at how culture shapes the everyday practices of communicating, coordinating and resolving conflict across sites. From that view, the bank's own practices deserve scrutiny. Your case notes that the London team sent requirements as one-line tickets and judged the work only at final testing, while the vendor's engineers rarely asked questions of a client they saw as senior. Neither practice was careless. The London team was used to colleagues down the hall who could fill gaps in a ticket by asking in person, and the vendor's engineers were used to clients who expected suppliers to execute rather than question. Each side was following norms that made sense locally, and together those norms let defects pile up unseen. Moran and Youngdahl (2008) describe culture as learned, which suggests both sides can learn new practices. If the bank had reviewed small pieces of work every week and asked the vendor's team directly what was unclear, do you think the defect rate would have changed?

References

Hinds, P., Liu, L., & Lyon, J. (2011). Putting the global in global work: An intercultural lens on the practice of cross-national collaboration. The Academy of Management Annals, 5(1), 135-188. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2011.586108

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

Tenzer, H., Pudelko, M., & Harzing, A.-W. (2014). The impact of language barriers on trust formation in multinational teams. Journal of International Business Studies, 45(5), 508-535. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2013.64