The Danish company LK, now belonging to Schneider Electronics, decided on transferring their labor intensive switch production to its Indian Joint Venture operation. During the planning phase, the company invested a lot in training all project team members on both sides, in Denmark and in India, in the following areas:

• Language: as the Indian project members had a high proficiency in English, their Danish colleagues needed to be brought up to a similar level by intensive language training.
• Basic rules of project management: all project members were familiarized with the company's internal methods regarding scheduling and budgeting. The meaning of responsibilities and deadlines was also explained to ensure a common understanding of critical terms and approaches.
• Reporting: all company internal reporting templates were translated into English and explained to all project members as the new standard for reporting and monitoring.

The Danish project manager created the project master plan including all activities.She travelled to the Indian site to present and discuss her plan with the Indian part of the team. As everything seemed to be agreed on, she returned to Denmark and was satisfied that all wasrunning smoothly.Two months later, shereturned to India to check the project progress against her plan.She expected all of the activities for the first period to be completed as she hadn't been told otherwise.She was quite irritated to see that nothing at all had happened in those two months.

Source: Adapted from Vonsild and Jensen (2006)

Assignment questions

1. Perform a Culture Gap analysis, identifyingtwo dimensions that warrented attention.Justify your selections. Identify your source for the culture gap analysis.
2. 
   

Cultural Gap Analysis between Denmark and India

           

Dimension 1a	Denmark		Dimension 1b
India
Dimension 2a	Denmark		Dimension 2b
India

Identify at least 5 decisions/actions you would perform differently than the Danish project manager.

 

 

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Culture Gap Analysis Dimension 1 Communication Styles Denmark Direct Communication Danish culture tends to value directness and explicitness in communication Feedback is often given openly and directl... View the full answer