Abstract
Alstom manufactures trains, metros and trolleys and is number two in it's industry worldwide, after the Canadian Group Bombardier. The process is as follows. Each city desiring a metro or tram makes a takeover bid and in this case it was Budapest city. Alstom won this bid. There are two lines to be built, an automatic one (driverless) and a manual one. The particularity of this project is that Alstom outsources for the first time its production in Poland. The main reason for producing entirely a metro in Poland is to lower production costs, thanks to minor labor force costs. In this international context, we have co-ordination troubles due to the fact that the client is Hungarian, the engineers, designers and buyers are French and the production line is in Poland (and workers are thus Polish). The problems are, first, the language. Contractual language is English but this is not the native language of any of the protagonists. Each country has to use a different language than its original one, which creates lots of communication problems. People don't always understand each other. For the French, Polish are seen as naive, undergraduate and not reactive people. But production has been delocalized there for low cost labor force reasons. For the Polish, French are seen as proud, selfish and bossy. The French always think they know everything better than others and impose their way of thinking and doing. The problem of communication and the dominance of the French pushed the Polish to slow down the production on purpose, in order to manifest their unhappiness and reluctance in their leadership. Many tensions emerged and team work has become very difficult.
