• Imagine being promoted to be the head of the HR department with subsidiaries in China, India and Germany (or any other relevant countries with different cultural backgrounds). For the choice of the company, feel free to consider the realistic conditions; alternatively, create an imaginative scenario. In any case, please briefly describe the underlying conditions in your introduction.
• For your future role you are tasked to produce an internal report to the management in which it is required to describe the employees involvement strategy. The management wants to make sure that team work, motivation, involvement and work performance is very high across all the locations. Clearly identify which opportunities can arise from that, but also which challenges do the associate with working across the involved cultures. Please do provide related context information in the introduction.
• In particular, address relevant issues around leading/managing people in those countries, if you can see clear preferences for certain communication styles, are those associated with cultural patterns (of all underlying cultures), and if so, do those advance or hinder the unfolding of good cooperation within these dispersed cross-cultural teams? How do you envision communication taking place (face-to-face or virtually, and which issues do you associate with those to formats? And, based on your own work environment, can you make practically specific and relevant suggestions that you consider would help the future cooperation? If possible, please do include the perspectives of the other cultures, as this will be important in order for you to create a more balanced understanding of the underlying case.
• Following the seniority of your position and the target audience – the management of your company – you are required to academically substantiate your proposed considerations and solutions. Do include academic and non-academic sources that can advance your case. In any case, do use proper referencing.
• The written document shall be approx. 3,000 words (+10 %), and can be organized along the following structure
• introduction
• literature review: motivation tools (2 tools), involvement x 2, teamwork x 2 and performance x 2
• company overview and speak about the 3 locations (8 lines max)
• implementing motivation on target countries, discuss challenges, and communication problems
• implementing team work on target countries, discuss challenges, and communication problems
• implementing involvement on target countries, discuss challenges, and communication problems
• implementing work performance on target countries, discuss challenges, and communication problems
• Recommendation: present the final answer regarding the question objective which overall employee involvement strategy
• conclusion
• the assessment along the following criteria:
• Along structural requirements of senior management report, such as the above mentioned structure.
• Along formality requirements such as the ‘look and feel’ of your work with attention to detail in form of page numbers, chapter/headline numbering, ‘breathing space’ of the page, length of paragraphs (max 10 lines), referencing.
• Along quality requirements, such as the relevance of the executive summary, Table of Content, Introduction, literature review with sufficient references, the quality of the application to the content and formatting requirements of the Harvard Referencing System, the ability to display critical thinking and reflection in your submitted work, the quality of the discussion, the ability to conclude and the depth and relevance of suggested recommendations.
• along the ability to fit everything into a word count of 3,000 – 3,300 words.
