With the development of globalization, people live in an increasingly culturally dissimilar world. The changing environment forces international companies to re-construct their strategies and tens of thousands of people leave their countries for better education, career, and life opportunities. In the context, not only international companies but also domestic firms have no other options except hiring people from diverse cultures. It has become a usual phenomenon that a growing number of people with diverse cultural backgrounds exist in different organisations. The activities of human beings are heavily influenced by culture on various levels, e.g. individuals, nations and organizations, the influence of which also takes actions in …show more content…
Return to my own case – the multi-cultural team for study program. Although the language barrier increased troubles for communication and related management issues, the benefits that we gained from this kind of multi-cultural composition were also obvious. Two Chinese students including me had management background, the logic and systematic theory of which helped us construct a promising framework, and the Indian guy studying in School of Software took charge of all coding tasks for our group while the domestic Korean girls obtained empirical data from several local Korean firms effectively. In this case, everyone was assigned to the fittest task to enlarge their abilities.
It is promising that multi-cultural team provides the opportunity to create a flexible and open environment for management, where managers would be easy to activate the creativity of team members and construct a cooperative model to deal with team targets.
As we mentioned, multi-cultural team would be more and more common in the future, and how to manage multi-cultural team would become an emergent problem for human resource management. Aiming to provide some thoughts to improve work efficiency and help manager better construct and develop multi-cultural teams, we attempted to learn the challenges faced in multi-cultural teams. Behfar, Kern & Brett (2006) asserted that learning the cultural orientations of team
This in turn can increase the creativity and innovation within organizations. As well, individuals from diverse backgrounds are able to provide companies with insight into foreign business practices, translation assistance, and offer detailed information to assist in market penetration. A diverse working team can also improve decision making by providing different perspectives on problems. Individuals embrace working alongside other cultures, as it is a personal learning process that will prove useful in the future.
The positive impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can contribute creativity to a high-performance team. Membership diversity offers a rich pool of information, talent, and varied perspectives that can help improve team problem solving and increase creativity (Hunt, J., Osborn, R., Schermerhorn, J., 2005). Cultural diversity contributes various group input and group dynamics to the team. These two factors are essential in the high performance of a team. Cultural diversity can develop a high-performance team by allowing the diverse potentials of a team to operate. The negative impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can develop numerous of conflicts between team members. Conflicting interaction can limit or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of productivity. There should be an awareness of the diverse culture values in order to prevent these conflicts.
In the case “Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Tsedal Neeley states that lack of inappropriate communication, leadership and decision-making is root of the crisis of HS Holdings. Generally, cultural diversity is based on many things one being the idea that certain characteristics should not be completely disregarded but regulated and valued as important. With this in view, diverse cultural issues can result in organizational problems. First, we must view your techniques to manage your global team and recognize the primary root of the problems. Secondly, you will need to identify who should be responsible for the crisis of HS Holdings because of miscommunication and inefficient leadership. Thirdly, defining roles and job descriptions is extremely important in an open work environment and
The culture of team is weak, as there are no established norms and values or ground rules. As such, there was a discrepancy in the development of the team during the norming stage, as discussed previously. The team also engaged in a cultural clash in terms of industry areas, country/ethnic differences, and subcultures. The MGI founders related to a creative and artistic industry, while the students were business focused. The cultural differences manifested themselves in terms of language and expectations. And finally, within the subgroups were individual subcultures, which lead to a difference in values, roles, purposes, and goals especially when disagreements between these subcultures occurred (Hofstede, 1998). Multicultural teams can be more
People from different cultural background work together can have positive effect, since they can provide various perspectives on solving problems, attracting consumers, and cooperating with fellow workers. These new and various ideas can help our company to promote and take step into an amazing future.
Globalization and technological advancement have dictated the need for managers to deal with multiple ethnic groups with different culture in their day to day interactions. According to Kulkarni (2012), cultures play critical roles in individuals, including values, beliefs, humor, worries, fears, hopes, opinions, attachments, and anxieties.
In this paper I will discuss how a team/group can become a high-performance team/group, examine the demographic characteristics and culture diversity and the impact on the team/group behavior. I will also describe how demographic characteristics and cultural diversity contribute to or detract from high-performance groups or teams.
Multicultural teams have become more common in our organizations, and contemporary international management literature has identified that the management of multicultural teams is an
Diversity in culture and demographic characteristics can be a negative impact or be one of the team's greatest strengths, depending on how the team as a whole functions and applies these different “routes to success”. A group can become a high performing team by understanding how cultural and demographic differences influence group behavior. The groups must realize that they can benefit from their diversity to their advantage and into a high performance team.
In the case “Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Tsedal Neeley states that lack of inappropriate communication, leadership and decision-making is root of the crisis of HS Holdings. Overall, cultural diversity is based on the idea that cultural identities should not be discarded or ignored but rather maintained and valued. In view of this, diverse cultural differences can result in organizational problems. Firstly, identify your techniques to manage his global team and recognize the root of problems. Secondly, identify you should be responsible for the crisis of HS Holdings because of miscommunication and improper leadership. Thirdly, defining the important role of open work environment and diversity play in the case in order to focus on improvement of this two. Fourthly, finding out short-term development and long-term development for James to match solving organizational problem. At the end, summing all findings in a conclusion . Mentioning Greg, he is an unquestionable technical elites. After he earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Stanford University, he chose to work for the Sun Inc. Within four years, he had risen in the Data Protection and Recovery Department. Five years later, he achieved the Sun outstanding Manager award. (Neeley and Delong 5) Now, James works on a global team management position where he is struggling with team management. Within the team there was a lot of stress being built up
In this era of Globalisation, cross cultural management is the biggest challenge that is faced by the organisations. Within the business context, cross culture refers to interaction between different cultures. Cross cultural management refers to managing the employees from different cultural background in one environment (Adler, 2008). Cross culture management is a significant issue within the organisations as the success of an organisation depends upon the smooth interaction of the employees. This paper is aimed at providing insight on the cross cultural management and the main issues and challenges relating to cross cultural management. For the purpose of this paper, two articles, “Cross-cultural Differences in Management”, by Amman & Jordan
The workplace has become one of the biggest multicultural settings. Almost half of the work force in the United States is made up of minorities. There are many advantages to having this percentage of people from different cultures throughout our workplace. One is the increase in creativeness. Not only in products that are being created but in the developing of an approach to solving problems. "Other cultures can offer insightful alternatives" (EthoConnect). Another way in which the workplace is affected by this is in productivity and attitudes. When people of all cultures pull together to reach a common goal there are less limited boundaries and there are more global understanding that are used to help reach the world's market place; creating a larger market for products. With this change in productivity in the workplace is more desirable and enjoyable for all employees. The market place has become more global based that workers having a diverse culture base is very important to break down barriers in language and knowledge of certain markets. This affects our lives by more companies hiring more international job seekers.
Managers were concerned about knowing and understanding each and every perspective of their employee’s cultures. As they know that without studying or knowing the culture, coordination cannot be built between the employees. It is the existing perspective of managers dealing with cross-cultural management (Sultana, 2013).
Many opportunities are associated with a culturally diverse workplace and global expansion may have potential to provide just such a diverse work group. Cross-culturalism in business can provide leaders and employees with a wonderful opportunity to work with people from different backgrounds and cultures. In addition, “the more opportunities for business leaders to interact with people from different cultures, the more likely they will be to have positive attitudes from different cultures and identify, learn and apply diverse culturally-appropriate business behaviors” (Caligiuri & Tarique, 2012, p. 614). Culturally diverse environments offer a multitude of benefits including “the variety of perspectives, skills and personal attributes” (Matveeve & Nelson, 2004, p. 254). Moreover, multicultural teams have potential to “generate more ideas of higher quality in brainstorming tasks” (Matveeve &
Team The Impact of Team Cultural Intelligence and Cultural Heterogeneity on Team Shared Values. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(6), 941-962.