STYLES OF EXECUTION

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 854.

D Complete the sentence

C Prepositions

Match the verbs and prepositions as they occur together in the text.

Use an appropriate phrase from Excercise C to complete each sentence.

1.German managers take decisions …based on… their professional knowledge.

2.The qualities most valued in managers ………………… country to country.

3. To operate successfully in different countries you need to ………………… good ………………… different cultures.

4. In a global company, managers from different countries ………………… each other for the top jobs.

5. Expatriates who don't ………………… to the demands of working and living abroad sometimes return from their foreign assignment early.

Christopher Lorenz looks at the contrasting attitudes between German and British managers

A study comparing British and German approaches to man­agement has revealed the deep gulf which separates managerial behaviour in many German and British companies. The gap is so fundamental, especially among middle managers, that it can pose severe prob­lems for companies from the two countries which either merge or collaborate. The findings are from a study called “Managing in Britain and Germany” carried out by a team of German and British academics from Mannheim University and Templeton College, Oxford.

German managers – both top and middle - consider technical skill to be the most important aspect of their jobs, according to the study. It adds that German managers consider they earn their authority with col­leagues and subordinates from this “expert knowledge” rather than from their position in the organisational hierarchy.

In sharp contrast, British middle managers see them­selves as executives first and technicians second. As a result, German middle man­agers may find that the only people within their British partner companies who are capable of helping them solve routine problems are technical specialists who do not have management rank. Such an approach is bound to raise status problems in due course.

Other practical results of these differences include a greater tendency of British middle managers to regard the design of their departments as their own responsibility, and to reorganise them more frequently than happens in Germany. German middle managers can have “major problems in dealing with this”, the academics point out, since British middle managers also change their jobs more often. As a result, UK organisations often undergo “more or less constant change”.

The researchers almost certainly exaggerate the strengths of the German pattern; its very stability helps to create the rigid atti­tudes which stop many German companies from adjusting to external change. But the authors of the report are correct about the drawbacks of the more unstable and less technical­ly oriented British pattern. And they are right in con­cluding that the two coun­tries do not merely have different career systems but also, in effect, different ways of doing business.

From the Financial Times