Working Cross Culturally Forget Business as Usual Case Solution

The company faced similar challenges while it excitedly decided to expand to Russia. A well-established local competitor attempted to defame CPA's brand by making disparaging comments in the aim to drive CPA out of Russia. Tannis was assigned the responsibility to fly to Moscow and fix the situation quickly by talking to the media - A strategy proven successful in North America and Europe. However Tania was in a dilemma - She had to make a decision about how to take control of the situation. She could either employ the strategy endorsed by her seniors from the head office or she could trust the slow paced relationship based approach of Vujevic who was mindful of the local realities in Russia.

In the initial stages of the case when Tannis first arrived to Moscow she did well by focusing all of her attention towards the pertaining problem of CPA in Russia and handing over her other responsibilities to her team members. By the time she arrived and did her initial research she realized that she would need more time and efforts to understand the culture of Russia. A culture is a set of behavioural patterns a person learns and adopts determined by the beliefs, values and norms of the community he belongs to (Trompenaars, 1993). Edward Hall compares a culture to an iceberg, indicating that if a culture is an iceberg, the external part of the culture is the tip of the iceberg that we can see, and that can be learned theoretically. The external culture may include music, dance, traditions, objective knowledge etc. However the internal culture - the major part of the culture is hidden, below the surface of the society. The internal culture takes longer to explore and understand, as it consists of beliefs, values, attitudes, communication style, subjective knowledge etc. (Hall, 1976) (Harrapa Education, 2020). Therefore it was a good decision of Tannis to devote more time and attention towards dealing with a cross cultural business dilemma that required a well thought strategy.