Cultural differences and performance appraisals

We're going to look at this case study on V-Pharmel. This is an integrated customer products company which is producing a wide range of quality affordable household products, is ranked among the top hundred preferred employers, and it has manufacturing facilities in 14 countries and its products are sold in over 90 countries. Just to give you a little bit of background about the case study before we discuss the implications. Is a case of the management trainee. As you can see on this slide, there is a management trainee evaluation form. When they're on probation, their performance will be assessed by annually and this is how they assess the performance, they rate each employees based on this. The company has a comprehensive management trainee scheme whereby they hire management trainees from the top-ranked business schools in the US and put them through a two-year training program after which the trainee is assigned to a functional area and assigned a title of specialist.

In August 2017, they hired five management trainees for the marketing departments. Four of those were from the US and one from Singapore. This was the first time they've had to hire internationally for the scheme and AJ which is the one from Singapore was the only foreigner in the department. They all had similar backgrounds in terms of their degrees but AJ who was from Singapore was the only one who had worked in consumer products sales for four years. AJ has additional experience or work experience. AJ worked directly with a supervisor called Scott who was also American but the scheme was supervised by an overall head, Jim is his name. AJ's evaluation experience is what we want to focus on. Scott rarely gave AJ any work of substance and whenever AJ wanted to speak to Scott he was asked to meet him later as Scott was always very busy. Six months into their probation, the supervisors met with the overall boss to discuss the performance and progress of the management trainees. Each supervisor spoke briefly about their trainee and completed an appraisal form like the one displayed on this slide and submitted to the head of the department, Jim. All four management trainees who were Americans were rated fours and fives for each of the points by their supervisors but Jim's supervisor had rated him one on all of the criteria there. In other words, he had performed poorly for every of the points listed on that appraisal form. Now, if we look carefully at this there are issues because AJ, as you would expect became very disappointed. He didn't know what to do, he was frustrated. He tried to intervene and tried to ask questions why his performance has been rated like this. He had produced any reports to his boss. On what grounds has he been assessed and given this grade or these ratings? But he wouldn't have any answer and the head of the department kept saying to him don't worry, this is no problem. We know you're going to perform better the next time. Meanwhile, AJ is seeing that underneath the performance appraisal form, which is on the slide, it is written that this will remain in his file. It'll be part of his records. He became very worried and as nobody could explain anything further to him he decided to resign. This came as a shock to the bosses but they just had to let him go. Now the question is, what role did AJ and Scott, who was his supervisor, what role did their backgrounds play in this case?