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Ellen Moore: Living and Working in Korea Essay

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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 …show more content…

Besides, regarding to the clients, the JVI had never build up a connection with the client until the surprisingly got the contract, the existence of hierarchy and non-trust between client and project team lead to the inefficiency of obtaining client information, later resulted in Jack’s misleading proposal for market research. Also, because in the concept of high power distance, decision making process is limited one-way participation and communication (In the Eye of the Beholder, cross cultural lessons in leadership from project GLOBE, Mansour Javidan, Peter W. Dorfma, etc), Jack’s own lack of experience on project management made it is possible for the project to diverge from previous direction under one person’s leadership.

Question 3: What alternatives exist at this point? In Andrew’s position, what would you do? Why?
Based on the development of the event, the possible scenarios are 1) The dispute is taken to the JV Committee and Ellen is expelled from the group, taking the blame of being the ineffective leader; 2) recruiting new consultants for the project who have the required qualification and skills to do the job; 3) Jack is replaced by other consultant from JVI with relative more experience in project management. 4) Ellen and Jack communicate the problem and find a way to compromise.
For Andrew, under the obligation of the agreement with Korean company, if the tension between Ellen and Jack cannot

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