Week 3 of the International Management course focused on cross-cultural communication and decision making. In order to achieve effective communication, it is essential to understand the cultural differences and to overcome them so that negotiation and decision making processes can be carried out smoothly. This reality awaits our students in the Global BBA program and they are already facing this reality as our student body boasts a great diversity that prepares them for the globalized job market.
The first half of the class session was dedicated to today’s case about the crisis faced by a global customer implementation team and its global manager, which taught students about how miscommunication would soon bring a negative atmosphere among teammates with different cultural backgrounds, escalating and leading to conflict and management issues. Ultimately, this only impeded working on the customer system outage which required the whole team’s collaboration, which was what the global manager set out to do initially.
Following this case discussion, students did an online simulation about challenges related to cross-cultural communication and managing global teams. They were assigned the role of a native English speaker or a non-native English speaker and they had to prepare a VC presentation while having to overcome language and time constraints. By doing so, students experienced directly the importance of communication and how it can impede the performance, missions and goals.
Online simulations are used in our Global BBA courses to give students a first-hand experience of challenges or certain situations which require critical thinking, action and decision. Once the simulation is over, students will learn about their results and its implications during the debriefing session that creates the class takeaways.