In 1975, Fred Ferret opened Sydney Wire Works-a wire loom foundry in the heart o
ID: 363762 • Letter: I
Question
In 1975, Fred Ferret opened Sydney Wire Works-a wire loom foundry in the heart of Sydney's industrial area. Over the next 30 years he built his business up to be the number one provider of wire looms in Australia. Fred pinned his success on his no-nonsense authoritarian, task-based leadership style-something he associates with his command training in Vietnam. In 2005, his list of clients included: Telstra, Ford Australia, Optus and Andrew Antennas, with annual sales of respectively: $2.5 milion, $1.8 million, $1.2 million, and $1 million. He employed 250 staff in manufacturing, 25 staff in warehousing, 16 staff in administration and 32 staff in sales. Fred's business recently suffered a setback due mainly to the global financial crisis, and in 2008 he lost two of his biggest clients. As a result, Fred had to reduce his workforce by 40%. At the same time he expanded his sales force to extend sales operations into South East Asia. Now, in 2012, things are beginning to look up. He has just renegotiated with Telstra and Ford who are about to award him with contracts at least as large as his 2005 contracts. Fred has also been successful in Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia receiving contracts in total of over $10 million. Fred is now facing a problem even larger than his original problem. He has too few skilled workers to meet the demands of these new contracts. He also needs additional sales and technical staff to work overseas. Further, his recently laid-off workers are bitter with their recent redundancies and refuse to be re-employed. Rumours have since spread through the Sydney community that these workers had a poor work ethic and were not organisational focused, and Fred tried everything he could to retain them. Each also received generous payouts. Fred occasionally teaches at Sydney University where he is well received by students and staff. Gender This connection gave Fred an idea for a possible solution to his problem. He is negotiating with theAge university and TAFE to take the top 150 high achieving students from three classes: management, marketing, and electrical engineering. This will give him a new staff of 150 workers ready to start in four weeks. These students though, have had no previous work experience in this industry. Many have not even worked before. Most of the students are in their early twenties. They are all of Australian ethnicity and are mainly male. A breakdown of these students can be found in Table 1. Fred feels however, that given their lack of experience, he will need to establish tight job descriptions and work orders. Male Female 19 20 21 75% 25% 10% 15% 20% 25% 10% 20% 65% Management | 25% 10% 25% Restaurants | 15% 20% Work-related | 10% 23 24+ Electrical Marketing Work experience Bar work Retail Table 1. Breakdown of student demographicsExplanation / Answer
Geert Hofstede identifies five cultural dimensions, which are as following:
Because Fred’s new team is new and all from Australia with no experience prior and nothing in any other culture, the Individualism (IDV) dimension presents the greatest challenge when the sales team will head to Asia. Individualism deals with the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. So the ties between the team will be loose and sales will definitely be affected.