Black& decker-eastern hemisphere and the adp initiative,

a) One of the key concerns of Lancaster was the prevalence of different styles of management within the organization. There was a lack of uniformitywith which managers were approaching management as a discipline and thus resulting into different level of performances. It is also critical to note that Lancaster was also concerned about the lack of job rotation of the employees thus lacking the potential or opportunity to develop themselves for more challenging and diverse roles in future. He was also not satisfied with the way employee evaluation was done in the Eastern Hemisphere. He wanted to change the culture and build a company which could be flexible enough to adopt to different values and management practices applied throughout different other parts of the world also.
b)
Through ADP, Lancaster wanted to actually improve the employee development as he wanted employees in Eastern Hemisphere to be more trained and become more equipped to face the new challenges in terms of stiff competition being faced by the company. He wanted that ADP should contribute towards making employees more responsible and integrated with each other while at the same time become more participatory in nature. Apart from this, by implementing ADP, Lancaster was willing to change the culture of the organization and infuse in employees a new sense of understanding about how things are working at the international level. It was also intended to decrease the reliance of employees on management and make them more responsible for their development and training needs of the future.
c)
Probably the most important concern was that of the cultural conflict between the Asian employees and that of the other employees of the organization. Most of Asian managers actually raised their concerns regarding this system because of the lack of willingness of the employees to be actually more open for their bosses. Their lack of being critical of their bosses therefore may lead them not to provide the kind of feedback required to properly evaluate all employees through 360 degree appraisal.
d)
In order to properly implement the system, it is important to implement a hybrid system which takes into account the cultural aspects of organization also. Culture is something which changes slowly therefore it may be difficult for Lancaster to implement the required changes immediately as it may attract resistance from all levels.
It is however, also important to further refine the hybrid system to truly reflect upon the cultural side of doing business in Asia. It seems that considering the traditional weaknesses of Asian employees, even hybrid system may not work in its entirety. It is therefore critical that it must be further refined along with other strategic changes aimed at improving and changing the culture at Eastern Hemisphere. The implementation of Hybrid ADP therefore must be corroborated with certain important strategic steps such as making employees more accountable and responsible for their work and giving them more autonomy. It is critically important that employees must first get a feel of truly autonomy before they can be put through this type of appraisal system.