Cultural differences in American and German workplace practices

Organizational Behavior Case

This case is interesting because it portrays the cultural variances that an employee might find in different cultures from a first person perspective. First, an American employee shares his perspective about his experience working on a project in Germany. He finds that the employees are extraordinarily methodological during the planning phase of the project; then rather autonomous throughout the duration of the project. In his experience American firms generally set a goals and performance targets earlier in the project and do not require that the entire team comes to a consensus about the underlying ideologies that are driving the project while also expecting that the team leader takes a more authoritarian type approach.

From the German perspective, they feel as if they can devote all of the team's resources and energies in the planning phase then they can save a bunch of time down the road because all the employees are already on the same page. Since they all understand the entirety of the project on a deeper level than the American culture would generally allow for, they believe that this facilitates an approach that improves quality and allows the team to work autonomously on the tasks. Since the employees already have developed a comprehensive view of the project and its stages, it is believed that there generally isn't much of a need to extensive further collaboration.

There are several different models by which one could view this case. Organizational behavior modification might not be the ideal approach since each of the employees only had a temporary position on a cross-cultural project. However, if these positions became more permanent then such an approach has been shown successful in a range of applications; including positive organizational behavior (Luthans, Youssef, & Rawski, 2011). Furthermore, given the fact that each of the foreign employees were the only "outsiders" then this may have also acted to create tensions from the team and contribute to excessive judgments; similar to a halo effect.