Ellen Moore: Living and Working in Korea
Question 1: What are the problems in this case?
1. Elllen’s female identity made her an alienated participant in the work place in Korea, whose culture is dominantly masculine. The acceptance of her came in and took responsibility as the senior member of the project was early based on a compromise of her obtaining of required skills, however, her identity as a female was constantly reemphasized in the company’s social events.
2. Ellen and Jack were both initially appointed as the co-manager to the SI project, however, from the organizational structure perspective, the power was not equally distributed between the two participants: Jack clearly had much more commanding authority than Ellen. With Andrew involved in a distance manner and absented from daily management, and the other manager in the above hierarchy such as Mr. Park was only directly connected with Jack instead of Ellen, all of those factors had resulted in even sever power inequality.
3. The group project progress was severely delayed, and the communication efficiency is low between the U.S personal and Korean personals, In addition, Jack as a senior consultant, had deliberately made work decisions diverged from the overall objective of the project (by adding a time consuming and unnecessary market research). Plus, the skills of other Korean consultants were obviously not sufficient and the effort that Ellen tried to make on coaching the junior consultant was interpreted by Jack as personally criticizing as him lacking of leadership ability.
4. The communication with clients was limited and the information exchange was restricted. The relationship with client was not established on a mutually beneficial service provider and buyer bases, rather the clients obtained relative dominate power towards the project group by requiring the consultant conduct extra tasks beyond work scope.
5. The higher management blamed the inefficiency of team performance sole on Ellen, which Andrew considered that it
1. Elllen’s female identity made her an alienated participant in the work place in Korea, whose culture is dominantly masculine. The acceptance of her came in and took responsibility as the senior member of the project was early based on a compromise of her obtaining of required skills, however, her identity as a female was constantly reemphasized in the company’s social events.
2. Ellen and Jack were both initially appointed as the co-manager to the SI project, however, from the organizational structure perspective, the power was not equally distributed between the two participants: Jack clearly had much more commanding authority than Ellen. With Andrew involved in a distance manner and absented from daily management, and the other manager in the above hierarchy such as Mr. Park was only directly connected with Jack instead of Ellen, all of those factors had resulted in even sever power inequality.
3. The group project progress was severely delayed, and the communication efficiency is low between the U.S personal and Korean personals, In addition, Jack as a senior consultant, had deliberately made work decisions diverged from the overall objective of the project (by adding a time consuming and unnecessary market research). Plus, the skills of other Korean consultants were obviously not sufficient and the effort that Ellen tried to make on coaching the junior consultant was interpreted by Jack as personally criticizing as him lacking of leadership ability.
4. The communication with clients was limited and the information exchange was restricted. The relationship with client was not established on a mutually beneficial service provider and buyer bases, rather the clients obtained relative dominate power towards the project group by requiring the consultant conduct extra tasks beyond work scope.
5. The higher management blamed the inefficiency of team performance sole on Ellen, which Andrew considered that it