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My Greatest Failure Case Study

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The major symptom is the experience differences between Mr. Abel and Dr. Bernard.
Mr. Abel is based on his detailed knowledge of business, his past experiences about problem solving and his paternalistic actions in managing the company whereas Dr. Bernard is mostly based on his educational knowledge, intellectual reflection and cooperation between the employees.

Moreover, the age difference between Mr. Abel and Dr. Bernhard is very significant. Mr. Abel has no real educational background; he has been working in Media AG for almost his entire career and was involved in different positions, which allowed him to climb in the company hierarchy. On the other hand, Dr. Bernard is much younger and managed to obtain a Master Degree in …show more content…

On the contrary, Dr. Bernard was more of a democratic leader and his way of performing was much different. He expected from his subordinates to provide suggestions to problems, to have a greater participation in the decision making process and encouraged mutual consultation rather than just giving orders. This is a critical change in leadership style, which can be explained by different Power Distance scores between France and Germany. When the PDI (Power Distance) score is high there is a considerable dependence of subordinates on bosses, which is the case of France where the score is 68. This is a relatively high result compared to Germany, which has a score of 35. In this case where the PDI is low, there is interdependence between bosses and subordinates. So Mr. Abel and Dr. Bernard had different styles of dealing with problems, which created confusion for the employees. Moreover, in countries with a high PDI score such as France, the power within companies is very centralised and employees are not supposed to be part of the decision making process. This created a problem when Dr. Bernard, coming from a country with a Low PDI score, tried to involve them in making decisions since these methods were completely new to them.

In order to solve those problems, we can think of four different solutions with their advantages as well as disadvantages, which are the following:

One of the solutions that we

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