Case Study 1 : Cross Cultural Persuasion

CASE STUDY 1 SUBMISSION : AUGUST 15TYPE OF SUBMISSION: HARD COPY SUBMISSION SOURCE: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/global-studies-and-language.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Situation: You are a senior at CEU ( Communication Excellence University), the top communication school in your country with a double major in Communication Analysis and Communication Management . This is the summer between your junior and senior year, and you are interning with Course Management International (CMI). CMI, a five-year-old company, developed and now sells educational software that helps faculty manage many of the administrative tasks associated with teaching a course. For example, CMI software can store a photo of every student in a course, and when instructors click on a particular photo, it can provide them with demographic information on that student, a list of all his/her grades, and a sample of his/her assignments.As part of the internship, you have been placed in a team with five other students from different universities. The composition of the team is three men and three women, all of whom are between their junior and senior years in school. By the end of the summer, you are to submit a report that describes two new functions that CMI should develop for the newest release of the software. The Problem: One of the members of the team is consistently late for team meetings, not pulling his/her weight, generally stays silent during discussions and will only speak when spoken to. As the team leader you have already talked to this member twice and found out that she/he is always late because she needs to wait for his/her parents to come home from work and get their permission before she/he can leave the house and attend the meeting. He/she also looks after his/her younger siblings after school while his/her parents are still at work. Your team mate realizes his/her importance to team and the report and after your second conversation have gotten his/her commitment that she/he will not be late again. However, four (4) meeting sessions after that conversation, nothing has changed and the deadline for the report is fast approaching. You call the attention of your team mate one again and this time she mentions that the only way he/she will allowed to attend the meeting on time is if you write her parents a letter requesting her/his presence in the meeting and stating in the letter how important your team mate is to the group and how valuable her contribution is. The Complication: You are part of the YELLOW CULTURE and your team mate is from the BLUE CULTURE. The Task: A. Considering the differences in cultures, choose any of the following actions: 1. If you decide to write this letter, compose a letter to his/her parents.2. If you decide not to write this letter, compose a letter instead to your team mate explaining why you decided not to write a letter to her parents. B. In not more than 10 sentences, justify your choice of action in letter A.