UCLA Cross-Cultural Communication Essay

Use this template to submit your work The Danish company LK, now belonging to Schneider Electronics, decided on transferring their labor intensive switch production to its Indian Joint Venture operation. During the planning phase, the company invested a lot in training all project team members on both sides, in Denmark and in India, in the following areas:

• Language: as the Indian project members had a high proficiency in English, their Danish colleagues needed to be brought up to a similar level by intensive language training.
• Basic rules of project management: all project members were familiarized with the company’s internal methods regarding scheduling and budgeting. The meaning of responsibilities and deadlines was also explained to ensure a common understanding of critical terms and approaches.
• Reporting: all company internal reporting templates were translated into English and explained to all project members as the new standard for reporting and monitoring.

The Danish project manager created the project master plan including all activities. She travelled to the Indian site to present and discuss her plan with the Indian part of the team. As everything seemed to be agreed on, she returned to Denmark and was satisfied that all was running smoothly. Two months later, she returned to India to check the project progress against her plan. She expected all of the activities for the first period to be completed as she hadn’t been told otherwise. She was quite irritated to see that nothing at all had happened in those two months.

Source: Adapted from Vonsild and Jensen (2006)

Assignment questions

1. Perform a Culture Gap analysis, identifying two dimensions that warrented attention. Justify your selections. Identify your source for the culture gap analysis. (5 points)
   • Tips: You may use one of Hofstede’s National Culture Dimensions (Links to an external site.) as a source for your assignment, however, you should also use:
     1. At least one cultural dimension from another source
     2. That ‘other’ source should be a scholarly journal (‘peer-reviewed’) article or scholarly textbook
     3. All of your references must be cited in APA formatting style

     If you need help with any of these above tasks, CoBE has a reference librarian (Naomi Schemm) who can help you: http://libguides.uww.edu/internationalbiz (Links to an external site.) – included in this library guide are tips for citing in APA style and additional guidance for what a ‘scholarly journal’ article is. There’s also 24/7 librarian support on the “Chat with a Librarian” feature on the bottom right hand side of Naomi’s library guide (Links to an external site.).

2. Identify at least 5 decisions/actions you would perform differently than the Danish project manager (5 points)