WP5 - Front Line Employee Web Poster

The topic of this blog was very relevant to my personal experiences. There have been many times where a company's internal processes and operations have caused me to become very irate. I have to take a step back to realize that the brunt of my frustrations, the front line people, have little to do with the problem. I empathize with their role as they take punishment from consumers on a daily basis. One prime example of this are service counter reps at airports. It isn't their fault that a plane is delayed... but passengers don't care. They'll yell, whine, curse, etc. as if that rep. was personally responsible for their inconvenience.

I feel that culture is important in this situation, but lines communication are paramount. Having clear channels for front-line workers to report back to the internal organization allows them to feel like they're helping solve the problem while providing the internal operations with tangible information. Without these channels of communication, the front line feel that they are being left to fend for themselves... and instead of being the face of the company, are acting as the scapegoat of the company.

WP4 - Effective Leadership in Organizations and Cultures

This web poster focused a bit on the differences between transformational and transactional leadership. This is an important concept that we've visited in this class and in other classes as well. Transformational leaders are those who take leadership as a motivational role, trying to get the best out of their subordinates. Transactional leaders take more of a supervisor role, trying to manage and control specific behaviors.

This is similar to the concepts of effective change management. Transactional leadership is based on rewards and punishments, but these only change short term behaviors. For effective change to take place, there must be an unfreezing phase... which necessitates transforming of fundamentals. Once these changes have been in place, rewards may be put in place to positively reinforce these behaviors and "refreeze" the change. So basically, transformational leadership is necessary to generate sustainable change.

WP3 - Cross-cultural Communication Issues in USA and India Organizations

Kartik's web poster brings up a very prevalent set of issues in today's global workplace. Inter-cultural communication unknowingly leads to many mis-communications and/or mis-understandings. Working with global teams, I find I must be careful to speak clearly and not use slang terminology or colloquialisms.

My first officemate ever had recently come to the U.S. from Hong Kong. While he spoke English fluently, he was determined to REALLY fit in... so he bought a huge book of colloquialisms. I cringed every time he would call something we were doing "groovy" or "that's so phat!" Flipping through the book, they had slang terms that I've never even heard of! Eventually I got tired of correcting him all the time (he asked me to point out any mis-use). I told him that he was trying to hard and stood out even more as a result.

Another personal anecdote - a cople years ago I went abroad on a business trip. I had trouble communicating with the language barrier, so I resorted to hand gestures and facial expressions. It was after a night of drinking and an almost fight that I was informed... signing "thumbs up" ... meant "F* You" in their culture! Ooops!

WP2 - Communicating Change Effectively

This web poster touches on a very central problem for many businesses. Change management is typically conducted in a very hierarchical fashion. Management dictates changes and encounter a deal of resistance. Companies typically have inertia, meaning that employees typically favor stability over change.

Even more resistance is encountered when strategic decisions from up above oppose common sense operational practicalities. As an employee, there have been many change decisions that I've shook my head and wondered why in the world they would do that. More disconcerting was the fact that there was no communication about rationale and/or avenues to provide feedback to the decision maker. As this web poster mentions:
Employees may have a better and more accurate assessment of the results of change compared to the manager, if heard they can protect the organization (Waddell & Sohal, 1998).

Change success may be drastically increased by involving employees in the decision making process. This not only helps add an operational perspective to decisions, but also increases employee buy-in. Both will typically increase a company's chance of successful change implementation.