ASSIGNMENT BRIEF
You are a member of the Board of an Australian Company. Your office is expanding overseas and you need to prepare one of your employees to take up the role of General Manager for that country. One obvious form or preparation for an overseas job is learning about the local culture of your new location. This is exactly what we will do: The reports will be in a business presentation type format.
Typically such reports focus on countries and may include any specific cultural space (country, region, city, etc.)
The report format and relevant issues to discuss include the following:
I. Title Page – Your company and target country
II. The Company– Brief description of your company and the key products it sells
III. Formal Institution Analysis – Specifics of the political, economic, technological, and legal environment of the target country, as relevant including corruption and how to deal with government interference.
IV. Informal Institutions Analysis – A general description of the target country and culture in the country (e.g., cultural dimensions, religion and beliefs, language, etc.)
A. How informal norms in society will affect your day to day role.
B. Management practices prevalent in this culture (e.g., how are employees hired? promoted? motivated?)
C. Any other interesting and specific details that provide a good understanding of “how things work”
V. The Expatriate – Skills and abilities that potential expatriates need in order to be successful in this culture
VI. Recommendation – Should we or should we not open up here? Summarise your justification.
No country will be assigned to more than 1 person. This way we will cover a wide range of cultures – knowledge from multiple cultures contributes to the development of cultural intelligence.
MARKING CRITERIA
A Marking Rubric is available online.
Individual Weightings for the final paper are as follows:
· Understanding of Country(30%)
· Quality of Research (20%)
· Quality of the Analysis and Recommendations (25%)
· Referencing, Structure, Grammar, (15%)