Case 3 - Report
CrossCultural Management (EBB036A05)
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
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Case Number: 3
Christmas in the Dutch Antilles
Word count: 1917
Learning Team Tutor : Laetitia Em
Learning Team group number : 11.
Learning Team members:
- Margaux Ginestet S
- Fajar Setiawan S
- Marc Lourens S
Watapana Inn Arunara is a company on the Dutch Antilles, but is managed from London by Joe Peterson, and has at its peak around 250 employees in several divisions. WIA has 4 direct competitors on the Dutch Antilles, which are also upscale hotels. Early 2015, WIA faced three major problems: ● · The expatriate manager turnover was beginning to become problematic; ● · Guest complaints had increased with more than 30% in the past 2 years; ● · Tension between expatriates and local staff members had increased. Therefore, general manager Joop Jacobs hired Brian Dijkstra as a participant observer to determine the underlying reasons behind those three problems. Dijkstra found 5 underlying issues that could explain the three problems the resort is facing (see Appendix 1). We ranked the issues by their time frames, meaning their urgency: the first one will be the first issue to address as solving it will help solving the other on a longer term
The first and most important issue we are facing is the managers and workers relationship: the leadership style might be inappropriate.
This issue is concerning the expatriate mid-level managers and the local staff. It does have direct and future consequences for the resorts. Indeed, some workers distance themselves from the managers even when they try to get closer to them (e.: the coworkers in the Water Sports department distance themselves the harder Pickering work). In addition, they are also more concerned about fitting with coworkers rather than making good impression with the managers. Finally, the tensions created by this lack of relationship between them could also cause the expatriates burnout and thus their high turnover. Indeed, if the manager feels everyday the tension with their staff increase, it could be a stress factor, and stress is positively correlated with burnouts (Statistics I classes, 2017). Then, we tried to identify the causes of such problems. Based on one of the worker’s response, one of the reason that local workers are not keen to get close to the managers is because foreign managers have high turnover. Muhammad says that he’s tired of making friends just to have them leave a year later, leading to a vicious circle of bad relationships / burnouts / turnover that needs to stop. The problem can also be caused of the managers lack of knowledge on Cross cultural management, like doing preliminary research and taking the time to explain each culture’s expectations before working together (Javidan, Dorfman, Luque, and House, 2016). Finally, one final explanation could be based on the GLOBE research (2018, see Appendix 2). In our opinion this case is congruence with Latin America GLOBE framework because in order to gain respect of the local workers, the
We managed to find three possible reasons for the lack of communication. First it is physically difficult to communicate: employees can’t seem to find the opportunity to talk to their managers, due to a lack of time granted for them. Employees have suggestions and problems that are not heard by anybody, such as repeated issues with London. There are also knowledge problems: even if they share a language (English official language with the Dutch, and Papiamentu, ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, 2018) they face difficulties. Because of illiteracy issues, managers and workers have to communicate orally and physically to be understood. It reduces the opportunities to convey an efficient message, and for it to be understood in time. Finally, the third reason is of interpretation problems: some of the managers simply don’t know how to communicate efficiently with their staff (e. Steve Lucas and his staff: “fail to tell me”). It can be because of cultural differences in the communication manners, such as the high context, indirect communication styles in Latin America being the opposite in the U.: low context, direct styles (Hall, 1976, and Thomas & Peterson, 2018).
The 4th issue is about distance management, as the top managers live in London or Miami and does not visit regularly.
The whole company is concerned by this issue, as the whole company suffers from it. Indeed, the employees may not know what is expected from them due to difficult in-person communication. Therefore, they might not perform to the maximum. Also, the (local) staff members will hardly feel any relation with top management, as they have barely any contact with them. This might prevent them from working harder (need to form group relationships, GLOBE, 2018). This will possibly give them the feeling that the managers are lazy and not working, increasing the tension between them. Teams are obliged to self-management as their top management is absent. The president lives in England, and does not visit WIA regularly. Due to the big distance, it might be hard to communicate in an efficient and clear way. Moreover, the top three managers are most of the time absent: staff members are forced to self-management, as there is a lack of (visible) management. As the antillean workers need to see their leaders get “their hands dirty” to value them and create bonds, seeing them abroad is not encouraging and may be directly linked to the motivation issue.
The last issue is about workers “incompetence”
In this issue the one that has major role are the government and the local workers itself. We did not include managers to be on the major role because in this case managers have already trying their best to give instruction to the workers but it still not enough, for example physically demonstrating to his staff what had to be
don).Because of the workers incompetence, there are performance inefficiency by the local workers, this can be seen by the customer complaints. The cause for this issue is firstly, there is a high functional illiteracy rate. Secondly, the policy from government that granted only a limited number of work permits to attract more experienced employee from foreign country relative to how many local workers WIA employed. Finally, the lack of schools can hinder people living in Caribbean to become competitive. As discussed before, government regulation plays an important role that caused this problem, because the number of work permits is limited to the extent that the company is hiring local workers, basically the more local people employed the more expatriate work permits the company can have. In addition, the managers can't fire the local workers as they would like because of the regulation. This causes the workers to be underperforming because they know that they can’t be fired. Aside from that, there is a positive correlation between illiteracy and incompetence. Based on the article “The unlettered state: illiteracy and intrusion in US social policy” (Ralf, St and Jennifer, 2002) which is a study to link illiteracy and incompetence in the US but it’s applicable globally. The article said “Illiteracy has come to metaphorically represent generalised incompetency, serving the interests of policy makers at federal and state levels”.
Ideas of Solution for
To deal with the problems, we have several ideas to come up with the solutions: ● Managers turnover which resulted from bad relationship with the local workers, or managers turnover in general can be solved by a contract , because there are many managers that suddenly quit on his own, it needed something like 3 or 5 years contract so that they can’t carelessly quit whenever they feel like it, it can also motivate people that are looking for a long-term job. ● Besides that, formal training about cultural differences can also help candidate what to expect when arrive at Dutch Antilles regarding the work environment or the culture. ● To solve the workers incompetence issue, an intensive job training could be one of the solution, even though the local workers have little knowledge for the job in the beginning. ● A better HR decision on recruiting new workers motivated/talented workers can also be the solution for this issue. Because there are cases where the workers have little motivation that they’re not motivated by incentive such as promotion or money, thus better recruitment process can reduce workers that have that kind of behavior.
Obstacles that might occur when implying the solutions
Appendix
N°
N°
GLOBE results on leader characteristics, 2018
Charismatic/Value-Based Leadership: “Reflects the ability to inspire, motivate, and expect high performance outcomes from others based on firmly held core values.” (GLOBE, 2017) Team-Oriented Leadership: “Emphasizes effective team building and implementation of a common purpose or goal among team members.” (GLOBE, 2017) Participative Leadership: “Reflects the degree to which managers involve others in making and implementing decisions.” (GLOBE, 2017) Humane-Oriented Leadership : “Reflects supportive and considerate leadership and includes compassion and generosity.” (GLOBE, 2017)
Autonomous Leadership: “ Refers to independent and individualistic leadership attributes.” (GLOBE, 2017) Self-Protective Leadership: “Focuses on ensuring the safety and security of the individual and group through status enhancement and face saving.” (GLOBE, 2017)
Based on GLOBE framework, it required a leader to have consideration (employee or relationship oriented, Thomas & Peterson, 2018) behaviors to be more successful. We can see in the GLOBE framework that the USA has relatively high requirement for a leader to be Charismatic, Team Oriented, and Participative. However it also has bigger variation in terms of scale which means that the requirement mentioned above is not a must (people with slight contribution to be charismatic, team oriented and participation is acceptable). While in Caribbean which is part of Latin America, required leader to have high Charisma, Team Orientation, and participation. Even though the scale seems similar to the USA, however the variation on the scale is smaller than the USA, which means that leader really must have a relatively high contribution towards those three characters, less than that could be fatal.
N°
In group collectivism: The degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organizations or families (GLOBE, 2017) Institutional collectivism : The degree to which organizational and societal institutional practices encourage and reward collective distribution of resources and collective action (GLOBE, 2017) Future orientation: The extent to which individuals engage in future-oriented behaviors such as delaying gratification, planning, and investing in the future (GLOBE, 2017)
The most important one may be future orientation, in which we can see that the Antillean people (as part of the Latin American cluster) are not much interested in future-oriented behavior, thus motivating through future promotions and responsibilities may be inefficient.
Case 3 - Report
Vak: CrossCultural Management (EBB036A05)
Universiteit: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
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