Minicase 87 3. You are a Mexican who has just accepted a shortterm assignment in Ireland. What are some of the expectations you may have about Irish behavior, drawing on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions? 4. If you had the choice of sending either a U.S. or Mexican businessperson to Japan for a three-year assignment, and both were equally qualified, why might sending the Mexican offer less risk on the culture side? 5. How could Trompenaars’s universalism-particularism dimension be helpful in sorting out confusion in the international division over ethical behavior? 6. Give a short description of an example of Trompenaars’s achievement-ascription dimension. 7. If you were advising a French colleague on her first work assignment to your home culture, and she asked you what aspects of the material culture she should pay attention to, what advice would you give her? 8. Choose a nationality of foreign worker that is found in your home environment and suggest what culture-related difficulties such a worker may experience in your culture. 9. How do you evaluate your own global mind-set levels? RESEARCH TASK http://globalEDGE.msu.edu/ MINICASE WHO WILL STAFF UP THE CHINA OPERATIONS? Your international company headquartered in New Jersey is sending an expatriate to China for a three-year assignment to staff up and run a new branch of its industrial products business. The main Chinese customers are using the products in their Middle Eastern and North African petroleum operations. You have extensive overseas experience and presently serve as VP, Human Resources. You chair the selection committee. There were 12 internal people interested in the position, and your committee has narrowed this to 3 final candidates, all of whom want this assignment. Here are the candidates: Tom is a mid-level finance manager with stellar performance reviews. He has no foreign experience and would like to develop his career in this direction. He is single, has an MBA, and has been out of school for 20 years. His background is in finance at the undergrad level, which he studied at Ohio State University, only 50 miles from his hometown. He is involved in the local Council on Foreign Relations and is an accomplished athlete. Firdaus is a deputy VP of HR at corporate. Her family emigrated from Yemen to Chicago when she was in grade school, and she speaks, reads, and writes Arabic, both classical and the Yemeni dialect. She is married, with two children. Her husband George is a professor of history and does not speak Arabic. She has a PhD in engineering, joined the company on the operations side, and has made the midcareer transition to HR successfully. She finished her PhD at the University of London in the UK before she began with the company and is now early midcareer. Her performance reviews are stellar. She encountered an incident at HQ several years ago when there was a discussion about her wearing a headscarf, but this was resolved without her changing her practice. She is well known and well liked throughout HQ. Her husband is ready to take a leave of absence for three years to accompany her. Use the globalEDGE website (http://globalEDGE.msu. edu/) to complete the following exercises: 1. You are a business consultant and an expert on cross-cultural communication. One of your client companies is looking for a partner in Rwanda. Before initiating their search for a joint venture, they want to make sure that they learn enough about the culture of Rwanda to be able to start building business relationships with Rwandan companies. Prepare a brief cultural guide for your customer that will help them start conversations and building relationships in Rwanda using information from the Center for Intercultural Learning. 2. Recently you had a very bad experience while giving a gift to executives of a Malaysian company. You had your gifts wrapped with a high-end white material but you later found out that the executives were offended as white wrapping symbolizes death and mourning in Malaysia. Next week you will be visiting the CEO of your Chilean partner and you’re planning to give him a very nice knife gift set you purchased during your last business trip to Switzerland. You would like to make sure that everything goes smoothly. Read about the business culture in Chile and examine gift giving practices. Is it okay to give a knife gift set to someone in Chile?
Geringer_InternationalBusiness
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