UNCOVERING TYPES OF CULTURAL ADJUSTMENT EXPERIENCED BY FACULTY MEMBERS AND THEIR ADJUSTMENT STRATEGIES IN WINAYAKA BUSINESS SCHOOL

• Main Author: Fajar Pratama, Muhammad
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/72277
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Higher education has become a desire for Indonesian scholars to enhance their competencies in talent competition recently. Recently, the information about further education (the university information, professors, projects, courses) and even scholarship is abundance and easy to access, resulting the increase of a phenomena where Indonesian scholars interest on going to further education, especially abroad. Winayaka Business School, one of business schools in Bandung, Indonesia, requires its faculty members to have master degree or PhD degree. Most of the faculty members choose to study abroad. Once they were coming back to home country after a quite long time living abroad, they may find difficulties of adjusting back from the host country culture to the home country culture, which called as reverse culture shock. Therefore, the researcher tried to conduct a study about this phenomenon, and understand what were the adjustment needed during the repatriation process, and propose a program to help returnees. To collect data, this research considered as a qualitative study since the researcher would like to know more detail about cultural readjustment concept. The study take sample from Winayaka Business School returnees who had completed their PhD studies for the last 10 years’ time frame. Data needed for this research will be collected through phenomenology method and individual interview to obtained subjective experience of returnees and explore complexity among breadth and depth of the cultural adjustment. Afterwards, data analyzed by using open coding analysis and proceeded to researcher interpretation. The result discovers there are five types of adjustment needed when returnees returned to Winayaka Business School, which are: Personal Life Adjustment, Occupational Responsibility Adjustment, Organizational Culture Adjustment, Adjustment in Contributing to the Organization, and Cultural Dimension Adjustment. There were several strategies that returnees had done in order to cope with those adjustments. The strategies will be showed on the analysis part of this thesis as interpretation result. There are also suggestions and recommendation for future returnees and Winayaka Business School in regard to help returnee adjust with the current condition of the organization as it follows: mutual respect, openness for new idea, communication, creating a repatriation preparation, optimizing returnees, individual assistant and general recommendation.