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THE CARELESS COLLABORATORS
Sara L. Keck and Anne Marie Francesco prepared this case solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not
intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names
and other identifying information to protect confidentiality.
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Copyright © 2000, Ivey Management Services
Version: (A) 2010-01-14
As my flight from Milan to Chicago took off, I sat wondering whether I was really as
insensitive to the cultural differences of colleagues as I felt. Despite the best of plans and
intentions to accommodate, facilitate, and negotiate, the week’s meeting in Milan had been
another disaster in terms of re-establishing rapport with other team members and
accomplishing productive joint research.
Doubting the value of my continued
membership in the group, both to myself and to the team, once again I had to decide
whether continued work on the international research project was worth the resources
dedicated to it. The long flight home in the business class seats might be a physically
comfortable one, but one likely to be fraught with meditation over the right thing to do for
the team and for myself. What should I do now? Drop out of the project or continue on?
If I continued, I had to find a way to address my problems in the group.
SUSAN’S BACKGROUND
Susan was a professor of management at a large state university with a growing international reputation
when the invitation was first extended to join a relatively small but prestigious research group. She had
received her PhD from Columbia University after spending several years as a management consultant.
Susan’s background was very broad in international experience, teaching, and research. She had been
married to an Iranian for many years, had lived with her husband’s family in Iran, and had taught English
as a second language in Iran. After completing her PhD, she had visited universities and guest-lectured in
several countries including Germany, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Italy, France and Belgium.
In addition to business and personal travel abroad, Susan also taught and researched in the area of
international management. She had research projects with a colleague in Japan as well as her own projects
in the Czech Republic. Most recently, her university had chosen her to teach in a faculty development
program at the University of Indonesia because the directors of the program recognized her expertise and
experience abroad.
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THOUGHTS ABOUT BUSINESS AND ACADEMIA
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Work on the academic project was not that different from work on business teams. Susan had extensive
experience in working on teams as a consultant. She had been both a team member and leader for several
projects during her time as a management consultant. Her familiarity with teams in both business and
academia led her to draw multiple parallels between such teams.
First, teams are often drawn from offices across geographic areas such as the project she worked on in
Boise, Idaho. The members on that project came from Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Dallas.
Co-ordination efforts were extremely important and difficult on that project, as well. Firms also form
teams across national boundaries. Susan remembered a software development project on which she had
worked as a consultant to design and program a system that served the needs of a multinational with
multiple national accounting systems.
Second, the interaction within the academic team could facilitate or damage team performance just as it
could for business teams. Smoothly operating teams of any kind can lead to superior performance.
Unaddressed conflicts, unclear or unacceptable roles, unbalanced power relationships, or weak members
can become problems on any type of team. There had been one unfortunate team problem when Susan
worked on a client project. An unaddressed conflict between two team leaders who had opposing views
about how best to solve a design problem led to endless bickering and a near failure to complete the project
on time.
Third, both academic and business teams have a mission to accomplish and performance requirements
against which they are judged. Customer satisfaction with the design, timely completion of the project,
and billing within the agreed upon budget were all performance requirements Susan remembered well from
the consulting teams. On the whole, the research team’s mission and execution did not seem that different
from those of business teams.
THE TEAM’S BACKGROUND
The group, International Strategy Research Group (ISRG), had been formed for the purpose of conducting
scholarly research over national boundaries with members from multiple nations. The first project had
been directed toward the managerial effects of the 1992 European integration. While the second project
never quite got off the ground, the third project, the current one, was to be a very important one because it
was funded by the European Union (EU) and because it addressed some controversial theoretical issues.
The project was to address the stability of transnational strategies in certain industries of importance to EU
countries.
The book from the first project had been well received by both scholars and managers throughout
continental Europe and the United Kingdom. Despite variation in English language skills on the team (the
book was written in English) and fighting among some members, the first book was of high quality and
was completed on time. This first project included a group of about eight professors from France,
Germany, Italy, Britain and Sweden. This original group considered themselves to be a very closely-knit
cohort of researchers who had personal as well as professional ties.
The second project was just getting started when Susan met Professor Kent Peters at an international
conference on managing the global economy. Kent had spearheaded the final writing and completion of
the first book on European Integration. Kent and Susan met at several subsequent conferences. During a
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trip to Britain in January 1992, they met again and in the course of conversation, Susan mentioned that she
would be traveling to the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia). Kent considered this a golden
opportunity for the ISRG group to have interviews conducted for the second project on organizational
change in Eastern and Central Europe.
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SUSAN’S EXPERIENCE
I was absolutely delighted to have been asked to join the prestigious group with a
controversial research agenda, and I considered the invitation evidence of the recognition
of my scholarly research as well as my ability to interact well across cultures. I made
preparations and conducted the Czech interviews. Unfortunately, that project never got
off the ground because the European members were unable to obtain funding.
The ISRG group seemed to be signaling their continued respect for my work by asking me
to join the third project, which did receive generous funding from the European
Commission. Even though the grant would not cover expenses incurred outside the EU by
Americans and funding would have to obtained elsewhere, I was still enthusiastic about
participation because the study was interesting, and it was an opportunity to work in a very
unusual multinational group of diverse scholars from multiple perspectives including
comparative management, strategy and organizational behavior.
Indeed, it was a group that was diverse on multiple dimensions. There was, of course,
diversity of national backgrounds. But, beyond the issue of nationality was diversity of
type of institution, individual age and academic experience, and academic discipline. I
had noticed that there were only three other women in the group of 15 or so people, and
none of these women, including myself, was of senior academic rank.
THE FIRST MEETING: LYON, FRANCE
The first meeting for the third project took place in June 1993 in Lyon, France. Because the French team
had secured the EU funding, the French members hosted the first meeting and set the team in motion. The
third project was to be conducted by representatives of Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain,
Britain, Belgium and the United States. Canada was to be included if someone could be recruited to carry
out the work. This broad representation of countries and universities was new for the team. This was the
first time the ISRG group had been so large and unwieldy, but the project was broad in intention within the
EU grant. The monetary value of the EU grant was very high, and consequently, the size of the group was
justified, both from the workload and from the approval of the EU.
Each member was sent a preliminary copy of the questionnaire and was asked by the project co-ordinator
to conduct at least one pilot interview in his or her respective country. Not everyone was as fast out of the
blocks as Kent and Susan. Kent, representing the British team, and Susan, being the only American
member, had conducted interviews in Britain and the United States before this meeting. No one else
conducted any pilot interviews.
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