Perspectives

Conducting international assignments

I therefore thought that a good place to start is an article on sharing and developing knowledge of organizational culture during international assignments. Brendan Boyle, Stephen Nicholas and Rebecca Mitchell work at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The authors regard organizational culture as a category of knowledge. The article opens with a good discussion of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and cross-cultural management research. The overall objective of the article is presented as showing ways in which the study of organization culture in MNEs explicitly acknowledges the complexity of these enterprises, especially where this culture is not homogenous across the organization. ¹

The key issue addressed in this article is how international assignments facilitate the sharing and development of knowledge of organization culture in MNEs. A series of interviews was conducted with 21 individuals from a range of countries and cultures. All of these were with organizations with more than 1000 employees and where the interviewees had spent a significant amount of time in the organization, typically six months or more. It is important to note that the interviewees were not consultants but managers of the organization who were working in offices in different countries, often with the ancillary aim of integrating or at least flattening the differences in organizational culture between these offices as an outcome of their work.

What emerges from the analysis is that in all cases a very wide range of organizational cultures existed. Many of these cultures did not correspond to what might be regarded as the headquarter (HQ) culture because the HQ was only quite a small (and often administrative) office and the overseas offices were substantially larger.

This article raises an issue that I find is common to many of the articles I read in academic publications; the authors write only for the academic community and not for the business community. To do so does not require any form of dumbing down of the research and its presentation, just (!) a summary from which an operational manager can take advantage. A section in their article that provided guidance for managers when selecting and scoping overseas assignments in multinational enterprises would be of immense value. This article is an especially good example as the research team could easily have asked the 21 interviewees for a short list of the critical success factors for international assignments based on not only their own experience but also an early draft of the article. An opportunity lost, and hopefully Sage might consider bringing this to the attention of its journal editors.

Meeting behaviour in Arabic business culture

One of the most interesting projects I have worked on was the implementation of an intranet for a diversified conglomerate in Kuwait. This was my first experience of working in the Gulf though I had undertaken a small project in Dubai some years ago. I think I was not prepared for the very different way of working in the Gulf and was very pleased to be a member of a large consulting team where I could sit in on meetings with other projects and learn how meetings were conducted. ²

As Kemp and Williams state in the article’s abstract, in today’s globalized business environment managers regularly interact with employees from different cultures. Since meetings are endemic to all business organizations, better understanding of the way meetings are conducted in diverse cross-cultural settings may increase organizational effectiveness. The study reported in this article looked at business meetings in the United Arab Emirates, a country where ethnic diversity across the workforce is prevalent. In the project I was working on I found that most of the senior managers were UK expatriates with many more junior managers from India. Local Kuwatis were employed mainly on administrative tasks. For this study, the authors collected qualitative data about meetings held in three large organizations, each with a diverse cross-cultural workforce, using the conceptual framework of ‘organizational rituals’ to explore the nature of meeting behaviour.

For me the major challenge was to sit in a meeting with employees who did not feel confident in speaking in English about their working day; I needed this information in order to develop ideas for the information architecture of the intranet. These staff preferred to use Arabic; this was then summarized by whichever of the participants had the best command of English. This person may not have been the most senior person present and I had to put great trust in the summarizers. This trust was not misplaced and in the end the intranet architecture worked well, but, for me, it was a radical change of working style.

Kemp and Williams provide a very good overview of the main characteristics of Arab meeting cultures, especially the emphasis on face-to-face communication and on progressively working towards developing a consensus on an issue over a number of meetings. The authors note that an attempt to get down to business right away without going through the obligatory small talk, to enable relationship building, is likely to be frowned on and even considered rude. In addition, from a Western perspective, where time is considered a scarce business resource to be managed efficiently, doing business this way can be frustrating and create impatience. The research project was conducted over a three-year period with the research team embedded in three quite different organizations and taking an ethnographic approach to understanding meeting protocols and behaviours. The analysis in the article considers aspects of the formality of the meetings, participant performance in the meetings and meeting symbolism. The symbolism mainly related to the physical location and organization of meetings.

Although this might be regarded as a small-scale project, the outcomes seem to me to scale across the Gulf States and to other countries with an Arabic business culture. The article is essential reading for any organization with business interests in this region, especially if the view is currently being taken that videoconferencing is the optimum way of running business meetings!

Telling tales at work

As a consultant, I tell a lot of stories in the course of an engagement and also at conferences. Often I have to change the names and modify the characteristics of the organization but I find it a very valuable way of getting messages across in a memorable way. Indeed not so long ago a client quoted back to me a story they had forgotten I had told them a year or so earlier! I suspect that like many readers of Business Information Review I first came across storytelling from the work of Steve Denning at the World Bank. This article by Yang looks at the evolution of storytelling by comparing descriptions of storytelling among Ju/Wasi hunter gatherers of the Kalahari desert and storytelling in industrial organizations, principally discussing the groundbreaking work on how Xerox copier engineers used storytelling. ³

Yang’s analysis makes fascinating reading and looks at storytelling as a cognitive device for organizing memory and knowledge, storytelling as a sense-making tool, storytelling as a communications tool, sharing stories as a bonding mechanism in communities of practice and finally storytelling as a vehicle for cultural transmission.

Putting storytelling into this evolutionary context is unlikely to have an immediate impact on knowledge exchange in your organization, but I found that it made me think about the different aspects of storytelling and whether I am using the best category of story in a particular situation. One of the practical aspects of supporting storytelling is in the design of workspaces. In his article Charlie Yang mentions the way in which Novartis has taken this into account and you might want to look at a very interesting paper on design issues for knowledge transfer that provides more detail on the Novartis approach. Zoller and Boutellire propose some design principles for laboratory and office workspace to support the strong and weak ties of scientist networks, showing that space is of outstanding importance in an environment of large task uncertainty, which is the case in pharmaceutical research and development. ⁴

The role of intranets in culture change

Somewhat surprisingly there have been very few research articles on intranet implementation. I have a small collection and am always on the look out for additional research. I was therefore delighted to come across this recent article on the role of an intranet in helping employees understand and take advantage of organizational culture. ⁵ The article is also interesting because of the perspective that the author takes on the implications for virtual human resource development (VHRD). This is defined as ‘a media rich and culturally relevant web environment that strategically improves expertise, performance, innovation and community building through formal and informal learning’. Many intranet managers struggle to achieve a high level of engagement with HRDs in their organizations and this could be just the article to enable them to build some bridges.

I should first highlight the very considerable experience of the author in this topic. Elisabeth E Bennett is a faculty member in the graduate education programmes at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Dr Bennett’s research interests include VHRD, organizational culture and change and informal learning in virtual environments. In 2009, she proposed a definition of virtual HRD based on her 2006 dissertation study, which researched organizational culture and intranet technology in a community hospital.

The author highlights the gap in the HRD literature related to intranets and learning organizational culture and a dearth of empirical studies within VHRD. The purpose of this article is to report the findings of a qualitative case study that purposed to understand how organizational culture was embedded in an intranet. The report specifically focuses on the question of how an intranet provides opportunities for adults to learn organizational culture defined as the shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that determine how members interpret events and act in an organizational environment. The study was designed to be carried out in any organization that regarded the intranet as strategic for achieving organizational mission and its findings could be replicated in other organizations. The setting for the research was a community hospital that had implemented an intranet six years before the start of the study.

The research methodology was to interview 12 managers in depth using a semi-structured interview supplemented by a review of the hospital’s intranet and other contextual information. The primary research question was ‘how does the intranet provide opportunities for adults to learn organizational culture?’ Four thematic categories were discovered through inductive analysis. They indicated that the intranet provided cultural learning opportunities through members (a) experiencing the wider organization, (b) recognizing and rewarding performance, (c) reinforcing organizational expectations and (d) modelling corporate communication style. Each of these is discussed at some length in the article in a very practical way and providing a wealth of ideas on which any intranet manager can capitalize.

The article’s overall conclusion is that that cultural knowledge is conveyed and renewed through the intranet. Even though this study is based on just a single organization, the implications for intranet managers are very important to consider. Indeed probably the most valuable section of this article is a set of four questions that in my view could well be the basis of an awayday between the intranet manager and a group of HR managers, which could well lead to a re-evaluation by the HR team of the role of the intranet in supporting organizational culture. The article has a very good bibliography, but it is of note that only one of the articles, by Dr Bennett, refers specifically to intranets. I would strongly recommend this article to any intranet manager. Interestingly, it appears in a journal for the HR community and would probably never be noticed by intranet managers in the course of their work. A groundbreaking article in my opinion.

Creating an ethos of trust in virtual teams

I continue to monitor the research literature for insights on how to manage virtual teams. To perform efficiently in a virtual environment, team members must develop what the authors of this article refer to as ‘swift trust’, which does not come inherently with team membership. The concept of swift trust dates back to 1996 and describes the formation and development of trust relations in short-term virtual teams and in the absence of pre-existing working relationships among team members. In the view of Germain and McGuire ⁶ understanding the individual, team, organizational and technological barriers affecting the development of swift trust is critical to an appreciation of how such barriers can be overcome.

As virtual teams are often hastily established, several barriers exist which affect how swift trust is established. From a review of the literature on virtual teams and research in the fields of psychology and organizational practice, four sets of barriers are identified, namely individual barriers, organizational barriers, technological barriers and team barriers. Each of these is discussed in some detail in the first section of the article.

The second section covers the role of HRD and VHRD in fostering swift trust in virtual teams. Here again is a reference to VHRD which is clearly a rapidly emerging area of interest in the HR community. (Although I have come across the concept before, this article and the preceding one on intranet support will result in me paying much more attention to VHRD in the future!). The three topics covered are building relational bonds in virtual online environments, the need for regular, prompt and consistent communication and a somewhat lightweight discussion on technology and virtual teams.

The final paragraph of the article is worth reading in full and even pinning to your digital desktop.

Our Millennial generation workers may have an inherent comfort with technology and the virtual environment. It does not mean, however, that they inherently know how to work effectively with virtual team members and develop trust. VHRD can help our diverse workforce thrive in such environments, not just virtually. Avoiding misunderstandings based on cultural and linguistic differences requires sensitization of all team members and training on how to work effectively in online environments, Virtual team leaders in particular need to be carefully selected and must display team, cultural, communication, and conflict management to foster swift trust and nurture effective virtual teams.

There is an excellent bibliography in the article from which I noted quite a number of interesting articles that I had overlooked.

Managing cross-functional teams

Although in general I look to feature recently published research in this column, in this issue I am dropping back to 2012 and an article published on what we in the UK call Boxing Day (December 26 and a public holiday). The reason for doing so is to highlight the concept of transactive memory system (TMS). The authors start by observing that cross-functional or multidisciplinary teams, in which representatives from different knowledge domains work together to accomplish a joint task, encountering challenges in balancing knowledge differentiation and integration as they work to achieve a joint outcome. ⁷ Differences in perceptions, practices and representations associated with knowledge specialization create communication problems in cross-functional teams, necessitating team members to engage in complex cognitive processes when integrating knowledge from different domains. ⁷

The author’s view is that there are three knowledge boundaries that can emerge at the boundaries between practices associated with different professional disciplines:

syntactic boundaries, resulting from differences in vocabulary and lexicon;

These boundaries create obstacles for communication and impede knowledge integration between members of cross-functional teams. Effectiveness of knowledge sharing in such teams relies, to a great extent, on the existence of a common knowledge that individuals from different professional communities use to share and access each other’s domain-specific knowledge.

TMS is a conceptual framework that dates back to the mid-1980s but has come to prominence over the last few years because of the growth of cross-functional teams in organizations. The TMS framework can help understand how groups and organizations come to develop ‘group minds’, memory systems that are more complex and potentially more effective than those of any of the individuals that comprise them. The introduction to TMS in the article is somewhat marred by constant reference to the published literature. This may be good academic practice but I would doubt how many practioners would have access to the wealth of referenced literature. The bibliography to this article runs to five pages!

However, the best way to read this article is to look first at the case study and in particular the questions that were asked in a survey conducted in a large Dutch health-care institute and then to go back to the beginning of the article when the section on TMS will make more sense. Compared to some other articles I have referred to in this column, this article is not on the list of ‘must reads’, but the TMS framework is an important tool in shaping a better understanding of cross-functional team issues and solutions.

Measuring the impact of knowledge management initiatives

Although implicitly knowledge management (KM) seems to be a crucial activity in a 21st-century knowledge economy, there has been a very active debate for many years about how to measure the impact of knowledge management on an organization. It is perhaps ironic that there are similar issues in the area of information management, but that’s a topic for a future column. The aim of this article ⁸ is to develop a taxonomy of KM performance measurements. After a general discussion about the importance of being able to measure the impact of KM, the authors consider eight specific measurement tools and four general measurement techniques that have been applied to measure the performance of KM.

The eight specific measurements are Intangible Assets Monitor, Skandia Navigator, Tobin’s Q Ratio, Human Resource Accounting, Balanced Scorecard, KP3 Methodology, Knowledge Management Performance Index and User-Satisfaction-Based System. The more general approaches (in that they have not been designed specifically for KM) are Analytical Network Process, Principal Component Analysis, Fuzzy Logic and Data Envelopment Analysis. The detailed discussion of each of these is very useful. I suspect that even experienced KM managers will not be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of all 12 of these evaluation methodologies. The chronology of the development of these metrics is an interesting element of the analysis as it also helps chart the development of KM itself. There is also a useful table that provides a comparison matrix of the features of the methodologies.

However, the highlight of this article for me is the final section in which the authors set out what is in effect a taxonomy of these methodologies. At the top level, there is a differentiation between KM resources, KM factors and KM processes. I am not quite convinced by the taxonomy, but it is a good starting point for knowledge managers to consider whether they are using the most appropriate metrics for the way in which knowledge is being managed and used in their organizations. The bibliography to this article is extensive and provides an excellent entry point into many of the key articles on knowledge management.