As I am an insider and manager within the organisation, participants may be concerned about consequences on their personal development although I guarantee confidentiality. Therefore I agreed with the L&D department that all non-tool based data (AAR, exit interviews) was collected by them and the information was given to me without names or contact details. I did the aggregation and evaluation and reviewed together with the L&D department the conclusions and derived actions. In cases of interviews the participants could decide whether to talk to me or to a representative from the L&D department.
I conducted the study as an Insider-researcher. Within my role as Strategy Director I experience the cultural challenges in my daily business and life. Whereas a HR manager would analyse situations in departments and between people from the outside (if it is not the HR department itself that is subject of the analysis), I am a member of the business processes and engage with the people on a personal and business level. In leading a multi- cultural team I experience the building of national groups within the team, in meetings, at the coffee bar or at lunch. I practice intercultural engagement and integration, for instance in setting up a ‘buddy-principle’ where a Chinese and a local employee work closely together and each benefits from the skills of the other, for instance the local benefits from the relationship of the Chinese to headquarters, and the Chinese gains from the other’s customer relationships. I also experience the drawbacks and sometimes feel like a ‘victim’ when important meetings are held in Chinese or the Chinese in my team get direct orders from a Chinese manager, as they take care of their personal career. I also detect myself at times talking about ‘us’ and ‘them’ which clearly shows me belonging to one cultural group, the Western one. For the research study I need to be aware of this potential bias. As insider- researcher I also need to self-reflect on what is a general issue within the company and what is my personal challenge, in not generalising personal observations and feelings. For this I have supervisions with the European Learning & Development director and with a coach outside the company.
In my relationship with the customer teams I may face ethical dilemmas in coaching individual participants and teams (Gray, et al. 2016). During the programme I was provided
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with information from customers that may have to be regarded as confidential. A supplier could have used this information in negotiations and for other purposes to gain advantage in their business. As a Huawei employee I needed to make ethical judgments drawing on my own moral compass (Lane and Corrie 2006) - when to share this information with other participants as it helped to drive the collaboration, and when to keep this information for myself in confidentiality. In such incidents I usually encouraged the participant from the customer to share this information by him/herself.
Carroll (2011) provides a five step model of ethical maturity that could help me to ensure being on the right track in developing my own ethical competence and applying this to the research project. The five steps in this ethical maturity process are
(1) Ethical Sensitivity: the awareness of the self, the consequences, the impact of behaviour;
(2) Ethical Discernment: the reflection, the problem solving process; taking ethical decisions;
(3) Ethical Implementation: how to implement the decisions; what supports and what blocks me in the implementation;
(4) Ethical Conversation: defending the decision; connecting to principles; making things public;
(5) Ethical Peace: living with the decision; learning from the process; letting go.
In the following I illustrate three cases in the course of the project and how I followed the ethical maturity flow.
Case 1:
I had to become aware of my own roles in the programme as a researcher, as one of the BDaC project directors and as a Huawei Business consultant (Step 1). As a business partner I might want to report success and to speed up processes. This could influence my role as a researcher. Therefore I took the decision to introduce the mediators – later called ‘Cultural Brokers’ (Step 2). This resulted in sharing of responsibility and also allowing others to contribute with new ideas which has first been a challenge for me, but then fostered more creativity so that we implemented the concept for both sides, at Huawei and at the customer (Step 3). In some projects the Cultural Brokers became quite independent and they did not always report back to me on their progress and initiatives. It became clear to me that this delegation required a high level of trust and continuous communication (Step 4). At the same time trust and communication are key requirements in the cross-cultural dialogue. So I could ‘walk the talk’ in practicing trust and confidence in the people, letting them conduct the programme implementation (Step 5).
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Case 2:
Ensuring anonymity of the respondents is one of the key criteria for the selection of the survey tool. Any breach of the promised anonymity would be a violation of my own code of conduct and of ethical standards (e.g. CASRO standards) (1). The Huawei internal survey tool could not fully satisfy these requirements. Therefore I needed to investigate a different tool that fulfilled the ethical standards (2). After selection I applied for the budget and presented reasons for using this tool, ensuring that it was also accepted by the customers (3). Finally we conducted all surveys with the Surveymonkey tool. There have been pros and cons in comparison with the company internal tool. In using that tool, I would have benefitted from more IT support and an automatic reminder function via the internal email system on responding. However, at the end it was better to use a tool that (a) fulfilled the ethical standards and (b) was respected as a neutral tool by all parties (4). I learned not to take any compromises on the ethical standards even if this resulted in additional effort and discussion (5).
Case 3:
Another ethical question was how to work with information provided by a customer who had provided the contact details for a further dialogue. On the one hand the person voluntarily shared very useful information for any follow up. On the other hand this information should not be used for business purposes and should not be made publicly available. A sensible handling of this information was required (1). I decided to share this information with the cultural brokers and with the project directors after instructing them not to copy or transfer any of this information to others (2). They then used the information in a respectful way, getting in contact with the individuals, appreciating their openness and starting the dialogue (3). I usually made this transparent to the respondents who received their personal feedback. However in some cases, due to time constraints, I did not manage to do so. I feel this has been ethically acceptable as the respondents did not share the information with me in person. However, I verified later with the respondents and the CBs on the respectful handling of the information (4). We did not have any complaint about confidentiality or breach of trust across the whole programme. I take this as a confirmation that ethical questions were addressed in an appropriate way. In the future I will include a more formal supervision process in the BDaC Standard Operating Procedure (5).
In any case, the ethical standards as well as the research programme as such required me to act as the role model for the cross-cultural collaboration. In practical terms this meant to demonstrate a non-judgmental mindset and a client-centric attitude. It was not important that my interventions, models and surveys were implemented to achieve my research targets, but to execute what was important for the teams in the moments of collaboration.
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