HR Report about Leadership

Please envision you are promoted to be the head of the HR department with subsidiaries in China, India and Germany (or any other relevant

countries with different cultural backgrounds). For the choice of the company, feel free to consider the realistic conditions of your

previous employer; alternatively, create an imaginative scenario. In any case, please briefly describe the underlying conditions in your

introduction.
For your future role you are tasked to produce an internal report to your management in which they ask you to describe your employees

involvement strategy. The management wants to make sure that team work, motivation, involvement and work performance is very high across

all the locations. Please clearly identify which opportunities can arise from that, but also which challenges do you associate with

working across the involved cultures. Please do provide related context information in the introduction.
In particular, you want to address relevant issues around leading/managing people in those countries, if you can see clear preferences for

certain communication styles, are those associated with cultural patterns (of all underlying cultures), and if so, do those advance or

hinder the unfolding of good cooperation within these dispersed cross-cultural teams? How do you envision communication taking place

(face-to-face or virtually, and which issues do you associate with those to formats? And, based on your own work environment, can you make

practically specific and relevant suggestions that you consider would help the future cooperation? If possible, please do include the

perspectives of the other cultures, as this will be important in order for you to create a more balanced understanding of the underlying

case.
Following the seniority of your position and the target audience – the management of your company – you are required to academically

substantiate your proposed considerations and solutions. Please do include academic and non-academic sources that can advance your case.

In any case, do use proper referencing. While you can choose which referencing style you follow, you are encouraged to employ ONLY one

referencing style, and, hence, need to make sure that you fit all references into that one style.
Your written document shall be approx. 3,000 words (+ 10 %), and can be organized along the following structure (this is only a

suggestion; feel free to choose your own structure):
Table of Content (not included in the word count)
Introduction
Theoretical exploration of potential opportunities/challenges (draw from literature, i. e. Bennett, Hofstede, Trompenaars, Hall,

motivation, teamwork, performance, involvement …etc.)
Discuss how the previously discussed opportunities/challenges fit into your underlying practically relevant scenario. Do you see any

confirmation of literature, or any contradictions?
Recommendation
Conclusion
References
Appendix
You will be assessed along the following criteria:
Along structural requirements of senior management report, such as the above mentioned structure.
Along formality requirements such as the ‘look and feel’ of your work with attention to detail in form of page numbers, chapter/headline

numbering, ‘breathing space’ of the page, length of paragraphs (max 10 lines), referencing format, and stringent application of chosen

formats such as line spacing between chapters and subheadlines.
Along quality requirements, such as the relevance of your executive summary, your Table of Content, your Introduction, your literature

review with sufficient references, the quality of the application to the content and formatting requirements of the Harvard Referencing

System, your ability to display critical thinking and reflection in your submitted work, the quality of the discussion, your ability to

conclude and the depth and relevance of suggested recommendations. Finally, you are also assessed
along your ability to fit everything into a word count of 3,000 – 3,300 words.
Avoid being Descriptive !!!

Further Guidelines:
Examples supporting your analysis should be referenced & briefed (very few lines/example MAX)
If you discuss any idea, a known fact, a market info without reference, then your assignment qualifies for plagiarism (>10% = FAIL

ASSIGNMENT)
Copying text without direct quoting (almost like stealing)
Failure to fully revise an idea from a source.
Change of writing style caused by copying from unreferenced work
Critically analyze everything, every idea you pose all over the assignment.
Avoid non-ending sentences, instead write paragraphs with few number of lines
Use title and sub titles (2,3,4,5…) levels.
Link your ideas and your paragraphs smoothly and avoid to write chunks of unrelated information, i.e. make your work coherent & smoothly

flowing
All assignments will be second-marked by the university. Some may be flagged to external markers.