Taking A Look At Ego Pharmaceuticals

In this essay, two communication attempts will be analysed and evaluated based on established communication models. I will first introduce you to the organisation I work with, Ego Pharmaceuticals, and also give you a brief breakdown of communication theory. Next, I will analyse two attempts at communication within the organisation. As a Demand Analyst at Ego Pharmaceuticals, my job primarily involves developing statistical models, and analysing data to determine trends and relationships. However a significant portion of my time now involves regular communication with a large number overseas staff in both Asia and the Middle East, relating to forecasting processes and models. Communicating with co-workers with such varying cultural and geographical

Due to the Arabic culture, the message received was that 9:00am was essentially a rough time, and any time after that would be fine. In this example, it is a lack of awareness, perhaps on both parties, of the cultural context that comes into play that caused the communication breakdown. One of the four paradigms of communication, outlined by Robert Krauss, is perspective taking. In his article, Krauss describes perspective taking as; “The meaning of even the most prosaic utterance is grounded in a set of implicit assumptions about what the communicators know, believe, feel and think. People experience the world from different vantage points, and the totality of each individual's experience is unique to the particular vantage points he or she occupies” (Krauss, 2000). The breakdown described above clearly highlights a lack of perspective taking from both

The question inevitably becomes, “Do the Arabic employees assimilate to the western way of doing business, simply because they’re employed by a Western organisation?”, or “Do the western employees of Ego accommodate the Arabic way of business and work around these cultural differences?”. In this instance I think that a utilitarian approach would work best, whereby whichever differences are deemed to be the most disruptive to the business as a whole, would need to change. In this case that would be the Middle Eastern employees of Ego. I would recommend communications to the Middle East would be structured communications in as many cases as possible. Structured communications are recorded or documented in some way, less likely to change and are more widely known and accessible (Bell and Smith, 2010). These characteristics would be vital in transitioning between cultural business models during the disruptive clashes. A second recommendation would be that the Middle Eastern Ego Pharmaceuticals staff receive some form of cultural training, to give them a better understanding of the Ego values, and also to give them the opportunity to understand how their Western counterparts work, and the impact some of cultural differences