Identify how incomplete mutual knowledge (common ground in the text) contributes to James' team conflict. (1 paragraph)
Due to incomplete mutual knowledge, team conflict became prevalent among James and his global virtual team. One example of this was how he conducted weekly conference calls with his
entire team of 45. He sends out a topic list the night before to address the issues with customer installation schedules and service contracts. When the calls got technical and drawn out, he focused on the bigger picture rather than paying attention to his team's needs. This structure led to teams feeling neglected and concerned about their productivity and performance. James understands that this meeting time is not sufficient given everyone’s constraints however, meeting times across various time zones need to be agreed upon and established from the get-go.
To ensure efficiency and satisfied employees, James could set up separate conference calls with each time zone to create more of an intimate and close-knit environment where others can voice their concerns and share their ideas without feeling less than one another. When the crisis occurred with HS Holdings, engineers across the various time zones seemed a bit lost regarding what their respective roles were as it was difficult to pinpoint who was responsible for which processes. James’ conference calls among the 45 members are solely technical which does not allow him to check in individually with employees to get caught up to speed with their weekly tasks which would ensure alignment among team members. This disconnect between team members and management also made employees feel as if they were being treated unfairly compared to each other. There was a lack of understanding when it came to certain cultural aspects that led to in-team conflict. Are there any of these gaps specifically cultural? How so? (a couple of sentences)
First, the U.S. team members became resentful of the French team members' long vacations because French law provided for several weeks of long vacations and the U.S. team members felt
that they were unfairly burdened with more work.
Second, UAE team members felt that they did not have enough face-to-face contact with James. They were concerned that James did not understand the unique culture and business challenges of their Middle Eastern market, and therefore feared that their performance evaluations would suffer. This incomplete shared knowledge led to UAE team members' concerns about their competencies and performance evaluations.
Which aspects of SPLIT were most fundamental to the problems at Sun Microsystems (choose no more than 2)? Justify your choice(s).
The aspects of the SPLIT analysis that were most fundamental to the issues at hand were process
and identity. In the process component, there was no official chain of command if a crisis were to arise. Although it was said to contact Nick on his weekend phone, this did not take into account the various time zones and how it would be the weekend for him, but not his European counterparts. As a result, this was not an efficient method for handling crisis management and caused several employees to spiral. Additionally, the system queue is interpreted differently across the global offices as the problem was entered into the wrong queue and a programming
