Ellen Moore's Case Summary

From the Ellen Moore’s case, there are lots of causes that relate to the cross-cultural difference that lead to the conflict situations.
Differentiation
According to cross-cultural aspects on the sources of conflicts in the organization, from the case, the differentiation source of conflict can be found in the case. The Korean people and the North American people have different beliefs and values. From the case, the Korean consultant, Mr. Jack Kim has his own beliefs and values to lead his subordinates, while the North American consultant, Ellen Moore has her own beliefs and values to lead the same subordinates of Mr. Jack Kim. The same subordinates but there are different leaders to lead them, so the subordinates perform in different ways
The scarce resource is the time limit to carry out the system implementation project. The project has set up a time limit for the team since Jack and Ellen are the co-managers of the SI projects. Since they are from different cultural background, with the time limit constraint, it leads them to argue on the process of the system implementation project. The time constraint makes the leaders have different perspectives on the project implementation which make the team has conflict situation. Therefore, the scarce resource is also the source of conflict in the organization.
Task Interdependence
Task interdependence is also the source of conflict in the organization in the case. From the case, it shows that the system implementation team has task interdependence because the party will interfere with each other by the co-leaders leading them. They rely on each other so that it exists interdependence for the leaders and the subordinates in the team. With the interdependence exists in a team, conflict is more likely to be exist. Therefore, task interdependence is also a source of conflict in the organization in the case.
Ambiguous
It is because the communication problem is that one of the leader of the team is the North American which use English as the communication language, another leader of the team is Korean, which are capable to use English to communicate but his mother language is Korean. For the team members in the team, they speak in Korean instead of English, therefore communication problem exists in the team. The leader, Ellen, is unable to use Korean to communicate with the team members and the co-leader, Jack and the team members are unable to listen to Ellen because their mother tongue is Korean. Jack can act as the bridge for the communication problem, however, Jack is unwilling to be the role to help to solve the communication problem because of his own inborn cultural beliefs and values in his mind, and therefore, the system implementation team has the communication problems. As a result, there is conflict problem in the team because of the communication problem. From the case, the communication problem is the source of the conflict in the