Working Globally
In the maelstrom of international business, employees must produce despite the challenges of working with colleagues from profoundly varied cultures, business customs, and geographical locations, and with wide-ranging levels of language proficiency.
In the predictable class setting of a university, how do students prepare for this global business environment?
Richmond’s Robins School of Business confronted this question in fall 2012 by offering an innovative class, Global Supply Chain Management. M.B.A. candidates taking this new course were required to complete their work as a team with IESEG students taking a similar course in Lille, France. IESEG is a business school branch of Lille Catholic University, a UR study abroad partner institution.
Dr. Amit Eynan, UR professor of management and CSX chair in management and accounting, created the course with Dr. Christine Di Martinelly, assistant professor at IESEG. They taught it concurrently while on two different continents.
“I wanted to provide students a firsthand experience of collaborating with people in other countries on a work project and coordinating despite all the barriers,” Eynan said. “We can talk about the various challenges, but it is only after facing them that we understand how many gaps we need to bridge.”
Students in the two classes—one in Lille and one in Richmond—had to learn how and when to communicate and how to solve project problems themselves.
“This class was an extension of what the M.B.A. program at Richmond already is doing—providing a number of experiences that help students prepare,” said Logan Tinder, GB ’13 and class participant. “This course took that to a whole different level.”
Tinder spent a month studying abroad in summer 2012 at another UR study abroad partner institution, the Vienna University of Business Administration and Economics in Vienna, Austria. That experience left him eager to maintain an international connection.
He was interested in the global supply chain management course as an elective. When he learned from Eynan that the course also would have an international component with Lille he said he “was in.”
Eynan consulted with Dr. Joe Hoff, UR associate dean of international education, to help Richmond students get ready for the course.
Hoff taught students intercultural skills and explained how differences in values can shape worldviews and might affect communication, actions, and decisions. He also helped them to recognize different communication styles as a cultural trait rather than a specific response to something they said or wrote.
Tinder credits his time in Vienna with M.B.A. candidates from 26 countries as additional preparation for the course. “The opportunity to study abroad allowed me to develop an ability to adapt to and appreciate world cultures.”
Tinder and Eynan agree that the biggest challenges in the course were the physical separation of classes on two continents and the time lag of six hours.
To communicate, the students considered cultural preferences and decided to use e-mail and Facebook chat. They had to think deliberately about the time zones and negotiate project schedules. Even though technically, assignments were due on the same calendar day for both classes, the French students needed data from the U.S.-based students a day earlier.
“Cultural differences aside, the time difference in itself was huge. It stretched us and our writing skills,” Tinder said. “Dr. Eynan kept telling us that this was real. This is how it is when working globally.”
Even more students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a similar cross-cultural experience in fall 2013 when the course will be offered to UR undergraduates in collaboration with IESEG, Lille.
“Overall, it was a great class, a great experience,” Tinder said.