CASE STUDY: MANAGING GLOBALLY
By Dr Kate Hutchings, School of Management, Queensland University of Technology
Miranda Greene has just returned to Melbourne from Wuxi in China following her twelfth four-week posting in a two-year period. Dave Sheffield, the national HR Manager at TS Construction and Engineering, which has operations throughout Australia, Southeast and China, has called her in for a debriefing interview and interim performance assessment. Miranda is feeling very tired, having just finished a month of regularly working 12-hour days and spending her evenings alone in her demountable accommodation located on-site outside of Wuxi.
Instead of facing a warm homecoming from her husband when she arrived at Tullamarine last night, she was greeted with an angry reception from Malcolm Greene who demanded to know, as he had done on several previous occasions, just how much longer their lives were going to continue with Miranda undertaking a fly in/fly out job between Australia and China while he is left at home unable to progress in his own career, which would also necessitate substantive amounts of international travel. After a heated argument in the car during the short journey to their Toorak home, Miranda reminds Malcolm that he was initially supportive of her taking a job that required international travel and provided them both with a much better standard of living than had she remained working for TS in rural Victoria. The argument ends with Malcolm saying that Miranda had promised him a year ago that she would return permanently to Melbourne so that they could try for a baby, and that if she continued to spend one month out of two in China, he would have to think seriously about seeking a divorce and ending their 12- ...