Wac - Building a Global Team

WAC- Building a Global Team

Submitted by: Amjad Ali Memon

ERP: 04266

Class Number: 11616

Time Slot: 11.30 am

Submitted to:

Dr. Nasir Afghan

Course:

Organizational Behavior and Leadership

Date: 29th October 2018

People in the Case

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Questions from my Analysis

1. What was the Company Culture ? Why were young employees promoted so early?
2. Why has TEK not hired someone at a senior position from within industry and why only from within organization?
3. Why was Amlak not able to solve problems he faced and why is he resigning despite being a high potential leader like Mr Khan?
4. Why employee satisfaction had plunged by more than half in two years?
5. Khan had good experience with teams in Asia like India, Pakistan Iraq and Bangladesh but will he able to connect teams from Russia, in same way ?
6. How the companies external environment was changing?
7. Why Sales figures were going down and was it affecting employees performance?
8. Does the company have open door policy?
9. How are the goals and targets set in the organization?
10. Why employees at lower level dis engaged?

Written Analysis of the Case

Tariq Khan who is only 33 years old is presented with a challenging position to lead a team of 68 people form 27 different counties. The team was diverse both in ethnicity, relgious and language. Mr Khan was supposed to bring a turnaround by reversing performance lag in motivating employees. achieve sales growth and increase market share. Khan had worked in role of business development majorly over his time at Tek but this task was more challenging as it was a big leap in career for the the position of General Manager Sales and Marketing. Tariq is facing a dilmena to accept the position and put his current job at risk as a more experienced and performance driven individual has resigned from the position. He is confused as what difference he can bring on the team what is senior couldn’t.

Main Issue and the Company/Industry Dynamics

Tek operating margin has fallen from around 61 % in 2003 to 49 % in 2005, at same time a 5 % fall in market share with same time frame. This situation to a fall in overall company’s financial position has had a negative impact on employees where employee satisfaction has fallen from 68 % to 36 % in 2005.

Company had employees from around 26 countries which was a well divers-ed team operated throughout. It is important to understand the working of such multinationals where teams are diverse but work together in one team from cross functional departments, countries, regions and ethnicity. This is what multinationals promote that is integration. At same time cultural differences are kept apart so that all working relation is based on trust where managers have high level of emotional intelligence to keep the team intact.

From the case it is evident that Tek is one of such multinational where it promotes an environment of high performance work culture. They operate in fast paced world where they provide high profile opportunities to their employees quickly as employees are evaluated every two years for a senior level position.

 Khans Analysis and findings

Khans meeting with Ali Amlak provided him with further insights of situation where Amlak identified major problems at hand from cross culture misunderstanding to hurdles in implementation of new ideas. This arrised due to differences in boundaries of language, timezone and national culture age.

The first main problem Tariq identified was of different languages being spoken in teams with Russian at corner, Arabic at another. This created communication issues with  members were not fluent in English and would not open up to share their ideas.

When teams are diverse they need to understand cultural diversity that can be related to different religions, values and way of living. In the case that happened where people were insenstive towards each other as Lars remarked Saudi team member to be not living in 21st century when the colleague refused to drink. Also when the Saudi person was assumed to be german because he was working in german counterpart for years. The issue occured where these teams were not motivated to get to know each other whom they were working with.

Another key insight Tariq found out by his investigation from Farah, a lebanese customer service associate where self motivation was missing from individuals. Employees didn’t have idea why the company overall was not doing well and their link with the goals of the organisation was missing. There were other problems with target setting as Ramazan, a Kazakh member of leadership identified of target setting where targets were set from the top and not a central department. Sunil another member identified employees were demotivated due to compensation issues where incase of increase in prices employees were easily able to achieve 20 % variable of their salary. Time zone differences provided another hurdle in working as Middle East was closed Thursday, Friday as opposed to a common Saturday, Sunday weekend.