Culture is the collective programming (thinking, feeling and acting) of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. During the late 1980’s and early 1990s, the term culture was applied in the business world, to refer to the attitudes and behavior of corporations. Over the last twenty years, understanding different cultures has become essential as companies and organizations are more internationally-oriented. Human beings have been working together and learning to cooperate for millions of years. Efficiency and satisfaction are improved by cooperation and working together.
In that sense, multi-cultural teams have become a competitive advantage of organizational life in different parts of the world. Multi-cultural teams can provide all elements for an effective fusion of different project management practices. Multi-cultural team can be defined as a collection of individuals with different cultural backgrounds, who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems, and who manage their relationships across organizational boundaries and beyond.
In order to understand multicultural teams, it is crucial to examine culture and how it impacts individual team members. Moreover, other macro-level aspects such as the sector of work (development, education), industry (high technology, manufacturing), may play some role in impacting the nature and effectiveness of multicultural teams in a certain situation.
A multi-cultural workforce is one in which a wide range of cultural differences exist among the employees in the organization. While a number of major and minor traits are used to describe cultural differences, the most common traits used to identify the level of multi-culturalism evident in a given workforce often comes down to age, sex, ethnicity, physical ability, race and sexual orientation.
In general, a multi-cultural team is one in whose members are heterogeneous, many dissimilar in certain traits. Practically speaking, any workforce with two or more employees has some level of multiculturalism based on the basic assumption that no two people are exactly the same. People with differences have natural barriers in communication and relationships, and also tend to find more conflict in communication than people with shared backgrounds and life paradigms.
Multicultural teams offer a number of advantages to international firms, including deep knowledge of different product markets, culturally sensitive customer service, and 24-hour work rotations. But those advantages may be outweighed by problems stemming from cultural differences, which can seriously impair the effectiveness of a team or even bring it to a stalemate. Multicultural teams often generate frustrating management dilemmas.
Cultural differences can create substantial obstacles to effective teamwork, but these may be subtle and difficult to recognize until significant damage has already been done. In some cases, managers may create more problems than they resolve by intervening. The challenge in managing multicultural teams effectively is to recognize underlying cultural causes of conflict, and to intervene in ways that both get the team back on track and empower its members to deal with future challenges themselves.
Multi-cultural team challenges are manageable if managers and team members choose the right strategy and avoid imposing single-culture-based approaches on multicultural situations.
The Challenges
There is a common assumption that challenges on multicultural teams arise from differing styles of communication. But this is only one of the four categories that create barriers to a team’s ultimate success. These categories are direct versus indirect communication; trouble with accents and fluency; differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority; and conflicting norms for decision making.
Direct versus indirect communication: Communication in Western cultures is typically direct and explicit. The meaning is on the surface, and a listener doesn’t have to know much about the context or the speaker to interpret it. This is not true in many other cultures, where meaning is embedded in the way the message is presented. For example, Western negotiators get crucial information about the other party’s preferences and priorities by asking direct questions, such as “Do you prefer option A or option B?”
In cultures that use indirect communication, negotiators may have to infer preferences and priorities from changes, or the lack of them in the other party’s settlement proposal. In cross-cultural negotiations, the non-Westerner can understand the direct communications of the Westerner, but the Westerner has difficulty understanding the indirect communications of the non-Westerner. The differences between direct and indirect communication can cause serious damage to relationships when team projects run into problems. Communication challenges create barriers to effective teamwork by reducing information sharing, creating interpersonal conflict.
Trouble with accents and fluency: Although the most common language of international business is English, misunderstandings or deep frustration may occur because of nonnative speakers’ accents, lack of fluency, or problems with translation or usage. These may also influence perceptions of status or competence. Non-fluent team members may well be the most expert on the team, but their difficulty communicating knowledge makes it hard for the team to recognize and utilize their expertise. If teammates become frustrated or impatient with a lack of fluency, interpersonal conflicts can arise. Non-native speakers may become less motivated to contribute, or anxious about their performance evaluations and future career prospects. The organization as a whole pays a greater price, as its investment in a multicultural team fails to pay off.
Differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority: A challenge inherent in multicultural teamwork is that by design, teams have a rather flat structure. But team members from some cultures, in which people are treated differently according to their status in an organization, are uncomfortable on flat teams. If they defer to higher status team members, their behavior will be seen as appropriate when most of the team comes from a hierarchical culture; but they may damage their stature and credibility and even face humiliation if most of the team comes from an egalitarian culture. When, as a result of differing cultural norms, team members believe they’ve been treated disrespectfully, the whole project can blow up.
Conflicting norms for decision making: Cultures differ enormously when it comes to decision making, particularly how quickly decisions should be made and how much analysis is required beforehand. Managers from Western countries like to make decisions very quickly and with relatively little analysis by comparison with managers from other countries. Managers from other cultures may, for example, decline to share information until they understand the full scope of a project. But they can’t simply ignore the desire of their counterparts to make decisions quickly. The best solution is to make minor concessions on process, to learn to adjust to and even respect another approach to decision making.
Four Strategies
There are four key strategies for dealing with managing multi-cultural teams: adaptation (acknowledging cultural gaps openly and working around them), structural intervention (changing the shape of the team), managerial intervention (setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and exit (removing a team member when other options have failed).
There is no one right way to deal with a particular kind of multi-cultural problem; identifying the type of challenge is only the first step. The more crucial step is assessing the circumstances or ‘enabling situational conditions’ under which the team is working. For example, does the project allow any flexibility for change, or do deadlines make that impossible? Are there additional resources available that might be tapped? Is the team permanent or temporary? Does the team’s manager have the autonomy to make a decision about changing the team in some way? Once the situational conditions have been analyzed, the team’s leader can identify an appropriate response.
Adaptation: Some multi-cultural teams find ways to work with or around the challenges they face, adapting practices or attitudes without making changes to the group’s membership or assignments. Adaptation works when team members are willing to acknowledge and name their cultural differences and to assume responsibility for figuring out how to live with them. It’s often the best possible approach to a problem, because it typically involves less managerial time than other strategies; and because team members participate in solving the problem themselves, they learn from the process. When team members have this mind-set, they can be creative about protecting their own substantive differences while acceding to the processes of others.
Structural intervention: A structural intervention is a deliberate reorganization or reassignment designed to reduce interpersonal friction or to remove a source of conflict for one or more groups. This approach can be extremely effective when obvious subgroups demarcate the team (for example, headquarters versus national subsidiaries) or if team members are proud, defensive, threatened, or clinging to negative stereotypes of one another.
A manager can resolve conflicts stemming from status differences and language tensions among the team’s groups, by having the team meet face-to-face twice a year, not to discuss mundane day-to-day problems (of which there were many) but to identify a set of values that the team would use to direct and evaluate its progress, and breaking the team down into common sub-groups.
The subgrouping technique involves risks, however. It buffers people who are not working well together or not participating in the larger group for one reason or another. Sooner or later the team will have to assemble the pieces that the subgroups have come up with, so this approach relies on another structural intervention: Someone must become a mediator in order to see that the various pieces fit together.
Managerial intervention: When a manager behaves like an arbitrator or a judge, making a final decision without team involvement, neither the manager nor the team gains much insight into why the team has stalemated. But it is possible for team members to use managerial intervention effectively to sort out problems. Managerial intervention to set norms early in a team’s life can help the team start out with effective processes.
For example, in a multicultural team whose lingua franca is English, but some members, though they speak grammatically correct English, may have a very pronounced accent. In setting the ground rules for the team, the manager needs to address the challenge directly, by telling the members that they have been chosen for their task expertise, not their fluency in English, and that the team is going to have to work around language problems.
Exit: Possibly because many of the multi-cultural teams work on project basis, leaving the team is an infrequent strategy for managing multi-cultural team challenges. In short-term situations, unhappy team members can simply wait out the project. When teams are permanent, producing products or services, the exit of one or more members is a strategy of last resort, but it is used, either voluntarily or after a formal request from management. Exit is likely when emotions are running high and too much confidence is lost on both sides to salvage the situation.
Though multi-cultural teams face challenges that are not directly attributable to cultural differences, such differences underlay whatever problem needed to be addressed in many of the teams we studied. Furthermore, while serious in their own right when they have a negative effect on team functioning, cultural challenges may also unmask fundamental managerial problems. Managers who intervene early and set norms; teams and managers who structure social interaction and work to engage everyone on the team; and teams that can see problems as stemming from culture, not personality, approach challenges with good humor and creativity.
Managers who have to intervene when the team has reached a stalemate may be able to get the team moving again, but they seldom empower it to help itself the next time a stalemate occurs. When frustrated team members take some time to think through challenges and possible solutions themselves, it can make a huge difference.
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